THE  EAST 

OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 


THE  EAST 


OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 


BY 


HENRY  CODMAN  POTTER,  D.D.,  LL.D. 


BISHOP  OF  NEW  YORK 


NEW  YORK 

THE  CENTURY  CO. 

1902 


Copyright,  1900,  1901,  1902,  by 
THE  CENTURY  Co. 

Copyright,  1901,  by  The  Churchman  Co. 


Published  October,  190S 


THE  DEVINNE  PRE»S 


TO 

JOHN  PIERPONT  MORGAN 

FINANCIER,    PHILANTHROPIST,    FRIEND 

TO  WHOSE  MUNIFICENCE 

THESE  OPPORTUNITIES  FOE  OBSERVATION 
IN  THE  EAST  WERE  OWING,  AND  WHOSE 
CONSTRUCTIVE  GENIUS,  WHICH  UPBUILDS 
AND  NEVER  PULLS  DOWN,  HAS  INDICATED 
THE  TASKS  WHICH  AWAIT  WESTERN  CIV- 
ILIZATION IN  EASTERN  FIELDS 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

i.  CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUN- 
DERS      1 

n.  THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES  .  .  41 

HI.  IMPRESSIONS  OF  JAPAN 71 

iv.  IMPRESSIONS  OF  INDIA 103 

v.  IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  HAWAIIAN  ISLANDS  139 
vi.  INDIA:  ITS  PEOPLE  AND  ITS  RELIGIONS  169 


CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN 
BLUNDERS 


THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND 
TO-MORROW 


CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN 
BLUNDERS 

THE  traveler  who  has  journeyed  by 
steamboat  from  Hongkong  to  Canton 
by  night  wakes  in  the  morning  to  a  scene 
which  he  is  not  likely  to  forget.  The  condi- 
tions of  life  in  China  are  unique  in  this, 
that  they  are  but  little  limited  by  space. 
We  are  wont,  in  our  Western  world,  to  talk 
of  the  crowding  and  herding  in  great  cities ; 
and  in  one  aspect  of  these  the  East  has  no- 
thing to  match  them.  The  foundations 
there  are  so  often  insecure  that  buildings 
that  climb  up  like  ours  into  the  air,  with 
tens  of  stories  piled,  higher  and  higher, 
upon  one  another,  are  virtually  unknown; 
but,  on  the  other  hand,  we  see,  packed  into 
a  bullock-cart,  huddled  in  a  bamboo  hut, 
literally  heaped  upon  one  another  in  a  mud- 
walled  hovel,  in  the  streets,  or  on  the  road- 
side, numbers  of  people  who  ordinarily,  in 


4     THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEEOW 

our  world,  whatever  their  circumstances  of 
poverty  or  degradation,  would  not  endure 
such  crowding  for  an  instant.  This  char- 
acteristic, however,  in  the  Chinese  reaches 
its  climax  when  one  sees  their  life  in  boats. 
And  the  startling  idiosyncrasies  of  that  life 
are  revealed  with  no  more  comic  or  tragic 
distinctness— both,  in  fact,  are  there  often 
strangely  and  pathetically  intermingled- 
than  among  the  crowded  denizens  of  a  Chi- 
nese house-boat. 

And  nowhere  are  these  to  be  observed  in 
more  impressive  proportions  than  in  the 
great  sluggish  stream  on  whose  banks  is  the 
city  of  Canton.  Crowded  as  is  the  popula- 
tion of  any  Chinese  city,  Canton  in  this 
must  surely  be  preeminent,  and  in  the  case 
of  the  great  throngs  that  pack  her  dark  and 
narrow  streets  and  their  darker  and  nar- 
rower habitations,  this  teeming  flood  of  life 
overflows  its  bounds  and  spreads  itself  in 
a  vast  mass  of  boats  on  which  tens  of  thou- 
sands of  people  pass  their  whole  lives,  men, 
women,  and  children  almost  trampling 
upon  one  another,  and  preserving  them- 
selves from  being  crowded  into  the  stream 
to  drown  by  an  ingenuity  which  is  not  easily 
intelligible.  Indeed,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
they  do  not  always  succeed  in  doing  so. 
Life  is  not  accounted  of  much  value  in 


CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS     5 

China ;  and  its  enormous  surplus  of  popula- 
tion, which  under  the  present  conditions 
the  land  can  but  poorly  support,  is  depleted, 
whether  by  drowning  or  otherwise,  without 
awakening  much  concern  or  causing  much 
grief. 

On  the  morning  when  I  first  saw  Canton, 
looking  from  my  cabin  window  I  found  our 
steamer  surrounded  by  an  apparently  end- 
less flotilla  of  Chinese  house-boats,  and 
stood  fascinated  by  the  almost  myriad  life 
with  which  they  teemed.  No  one  who  has 
not  seen  it  has  ever  seen  anything  like  it. 
The  boats  are  twenty  or  thirty  feet  long, 
and  are  shop,  kitchen,  freight-house,  bed- 
room, nursery,  store-room,  all  in  one,  with 
sometimes  a  family  of  fifteen  or  twenty 
persons  to  crowd  and  strive,  eat  and  sleep, 
fight  for  the  opportunity  to  earn  their 
scanty  wage,  by  day  or  night,  and  often  to 
be  born  and  die  in  them.  The  children 
swarm  like  ants,  and  almost  before  they 
can  speak  are  tied  to  an  oar  and  made  to 
pull  it.  But  when  they  are  not  tied  thus 
they  are  sometimes  hustled  over  the  side  of 
the  boat.  They  sink  out  of  sight,  and  that 
is  the  end  of  them. 

To  this  frequent  occurrence  there  is,  how- 
ever, one  exception.  Now  and  then  you 
will  notice  a  toddling  little  creature  to 


6     THE  EAST  OP  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

whom  is  attached  a  small  balloon.  If  it 
tumbles  into  the  water  the  balloon  supports 
it ;  it  is  fished  out  with  a  long  pole,  cuffed 
and  scolded  by  its  irate  parent,  but  saved. 
And  this  is  simply  and  solely  because  "it" 
is  a  boy !  If  it  were  a  girl,  the  parent  would 
see  in  its  removal  a  gracious  providential 
interposition,  and  would  say,  in  the  Chinese 
manner,  "It  is  ordered."  If  one  follows, 
now,  along  that  slender  thread  that  binds 
the  Chinese  house-boat  boy  to  his  balloon, 
he  will  find,  I  think,  a  clue  to  much  of  Chi- 
nese character  and  Chinese  history.  The 
people  of  China  are  not  peculiar  in  prizing 
boys  more  than  girls,  for  that,  alas!  is  a 
characteristic  of  many  Christian  nations 
and  families.  They  are,  however,  peculiar 
in  their  reasons  for  doing  so.  With  us  one 
wants  to  perpetuate  his  name ;  to  shield,  by 
the  industry  or  prowess  of  sons,  the  widow 
and  daughters  that  he  may  leave  behind 
him;  or  to  join  with  his  own  energy  and  en- 
terprise that  of  another  of  his  own  name 
and  lineage.  But  with  a  Chinese  parent  the 
concern  is  quite  different.  He  expects,  in- 
deed, that  his  son  will  take  care  of  him  in 
his  old  age,  and,  in  fact,  filial  duty  in  this 
respect  is  carried  to  somewhat  grotesque 
lengths,  as  is  witnessed  by  a  legend  current 
in  China  that  a  married  son,  with  whom 


CHINESE  TEAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS     7 

lived  his  widowed  mother,  said  to  his  wife 
on  one  occasion :  ' '  My  income  will  not  sup- 
port my  mother,  you  and  me,  and  our  child. 
It  is  the  will  of  Heaven,  therefore,  that  we 
sacrifice  our  child  to  our  mother,  and  we 
will  bury  it  alive ' ' ;  which  on  preparing  to 
do  by  digging  a  grave  in  which  they  pro- 
posed to  bury  the  child  alive,  they  came 
upon  a  pot  of  gold  which  it  was  revealed 
was  hidden  there  for  their  enrichment  in 
reward  for  their  filial  conduct!  But,  as  I 
have  said,  a  boy's  life  is  precious  to  a  pa- 
rent not  merely  because  of  the  care  which 
he  is  bound  to  give  a  parent  in  his  old  age, 
but  because  it  is  the  supreme  duty  of  the 
son,  after  his  parent  is  dead,  to  make  the 
annual  offerings  upon  which  the  conditions 
of  the  parent 's  life  beyond  this  world  must, 
according  to  Chinese  theology,  depend. 
And  so  the  little  baby  boy  toddling  about 
the  crowded  house-boat  of  the  meanest 
peasant  has  a  balloon  fastened  to  his  tiny 
person,  not  as  a  token  of  any  especial  ten- 
derness on  the  part  of  his  parent,  but  rather 
in  what  might  be  called  a  forecasting  spirit 
of  other-world  thrift,  by  means  of  which  the 
parent  provides  for  his  future  interests 
after  he  is  dead. 

It  is  in  this  curious  combination  of  indi- 
rection, insensibility,  and  selfishness  that 


8     THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

one  must  needs  find  the  clue  to  a  great  deal 
of  Chinese  character.  No  one  can  come  into 
contact  with  this  people,  see  them  in  their 
own  homes,  or  go  ever  so  little  below  the 
surface  of  their  national  history,  without 
recognizing  that  they  are  marked  off  from 
other  races  by  certain  wholly  unique  and 
quite  distinctive  traits.  No  more  interest- 
ing or  timely  study  than  those  traits  can 
invite  the  Western  student. 

Timely,  I  say,  because  whatever  may 
have  been  the  situation  a  little  while  ago, 
in  the  matter  of  the  relations  of  China  to 
the  rest  of  the  world,  no  intelligent  ob- 
server can  be  insensible  to  the  fact  that  not 
only  have  they  begun  to  change,  but  that  in 
the  near  future  they  are  destined  to  be 
changed  more  and  more  rapidly.  No  one 
who  is  at  all  familiar  with  the  attitude  of 
the  Western  world,  by  which  I  mean,  for 
my  present  purpose,  the  civilizations  of 
Europe  and  America,  can  be  ignorant  of 
the  fact  that,  to  Western  ideas,  to  com- 
merce, the  arts,  international  intercourse, 
China  was  regarded  fifty  years  ago  as 
largely  inaccessible.  The  Great  Wall  of 
China  was  commonly  accepted  as  no  inapt 
image  of  the  great  life  of  China.  True,  we 
had  books  like  M.  Hue's  travels,  as  we  have 
had  since  then  Williams 's  "Middle  King- 


CHINESE   TRAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS     9 

dom";  but  as  we  read  them  we  only  re- 
ceived a  fresh  impression,  concerning 
China  and  the  Chinese,  of  impenetrability. 
Their  manners,  their  traditions,  their  men- 
tal processes,  all  these  seemed  to  be  what, 
largely,  their  public  highways  still  are — im- 
passable. It  is  told  by  an  acute  and  singu- 
larly just  and  impartial  observer  of  these 
Orientals  1  that  when  the  coolies  in  a  par- 
ticular neighborhood  in  North  China  learn 
that  a  foreigner  is  journeying  their  way, 
they  are  in  the  habit  of  going  out  into  the 
highways  and  digging  holes  and  pitfalls  in 
the  roads  which  render  them  impassable. 
The  unsuspecting  stranger  plunges  incon- 
tinently into  these,  and  then  the  neighbors 
appear  with  profuse  protestations  of  sym- 
pathy and  surprise,  and  having,  with  Ori- 
ental deliberation,  pulled  him  and  his  bul- 
lock-cart out  of  the  pit,  fill  the  pit  up  at 
their  leisure,  and  after  the  whole  process 
is  completed  charge  him  a  good  round  sum 
for  their  services.  Not  unlike  this  has  been 
the  experience  of  students  and  travelers  in 
China,  who  have  sought  to  find  their  way 
through  the  curious  impasse  of  the  Oriental 
mind,  and  who  have  vainly  struggled  to  dis- 
cover the  clues  which  would  explain  to  them 
the  manifold  eccentricities  of  Chinese  do- 

1  The  author  of  "  Chinese  Characteristics." 


10  THE  EAST  OP  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOREOW 

mestic  and  social  life,  the  principles  upon 
which  its  cities  and  provinces  are  governed, 
its  rules  of  conduct  regulated,  its  more 
serious  views  of  human  life  determined. 

There  is  little  doubt  that,  besides  that  ele- 
ment in  all  this  which  is  unconscious  and 
traditionally  characteristic,  there  has  been, 
with  the  Chinese  people,  a  good  deal  of  de- 
liberate intention.  They  have  not  wanted 
to  understand  us,  and  they  do  not  wish  that 
we  should  understand  them.  Sometimes, 
undoubtedly,  it  is  true  that  what  seems  ob- 
scure in  their  modes  of  speech  or  of  reckon- 
ing is  only  seemingly  so,  and  that,  at  bot- 
tom, they  are  more  accurate  than  we.  A 
Western  traveler  in  China  was,  on  one 
occasion,  loud  in  his  indignation  at  the  igno- 
rance, the  stupidity,  or  the  duplicity  which 
represented  to  him  that  the  distance  be- 
tween two  places  was  not  the  same  from 
east  to  west  as  from  west  to  east,  nor  the 
same  in  wet  weather  that  it  was  in  dry.  But 
it  was  pointed  out  to  him  that  distance  in 
a  journey  was  equitably  measured  by  the 
time  that  it  took  to  make  it,  and  that  a  jour- 
ney from  east  to  west  must  needs  be  longer 
if  it  was  up-hill  rather  than  down-hill,  or  if 
made  in  wet  weather  and  over  heavy  clay 
roads  rather  than  in  dry  weather.  Nobody, 
it  should  be  said  in  passing,  will  ever  be 


CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS  11 

just  to  the  Chinese  mind  or  to  Chinese 
modes  of  expression  who  does  not  bear  in 
mind  the  difference  in  Eastern  and  West- 
ern modes  of  thinking  of  which  this  is  an 
illustration. 

But  when  this  is  said,  it  must  still  be 
owned  by  any  one  who  has  had  experience 
of  the  children  of  the  Flowery  Kingdom 
that  they  are  often  purposely  obscure,  and 
that  they  do  not  always  want  to  understand 
us  or  to  be  understood  by  us.  Two  tem- 
peramental peculiarities  explain  this,  which 
are  too  often  little  accounted  of.  One  is 
their  enormous  contempt  for  the  outside 
barbarian,  and  the  other  is  their  imperturb- 
able contentment  with  their  own  life  and 
land  and  all  that  belongs  to  them.  One  en- 
counters the  Chinese  often  long  before  he 
has  reached  their  own  land.  They  are 
servants  in  a  California  household,  work- 
men on  some  great  Western  railway  or 
mining  enterprise,  or  cabin-' '  boys "  on 
some  Pacific  steamship.  I  wonder  whether 
those  who  have  met  them  under  these  vari- 
ous conditions  are  as  sensible  of  their  mild 
but  unmistakable  contempt  as  I  have  been. 
They  may  be  perfectly  civil  and  readily 
obliging,— I  have  always  found  them  so,— 
but,  beneath  that  mask  of  stolidity  which 
one  can  almost  never  penetrate,  there 


12    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

gleams  sometimes  an  elusive  hint  of  a  cer- 
tain calm  scorn  with  which  they  listen  to 
you  as  you  convey  to  them  your  wishes,  and 
with  which,  with  languid  and  machine-like 
accuracy,  they  fulfil  them.  "The  best  ser- 
vants in  the  world,"  cries  some  superficial 
and  unobservant  traveler ;  and  as  one  hears 
him  he  recalls  that  characteristic  personage 
in  one  of  Mr.  Thackeray's  "Letters  to  a 
Young  Man  about  Town"  (a  classic  for  the 
instruction  of  our  youth,  which  one  could 
wish  might  be  republished  with  every  new 
crop  of  boys),  where  Mr.  Brown  is  discours- 
ing to  his  nephew  on  the  subject  of  the  way 
in  which  wise  women  manage  their  hus- 
bands. "Your  father,  my  dear  Bob,"  says 
Mr.  Brown,  "thinks  your  mother  a  fool. 
Alas,  poor  man!  How  meek  she  is;  how 
she  never  disputes  with  him;  and  yet  with 
what  a  mild  contempt  for  his  masculine 
stupidity  she  most  accurately  measures 
and  manages  him!"  But  no  woman's  con- 
tempt for  her  husband  ever  matched  a 
Chinaman's  contempt  for  the  "white 
devil ' '  who  is  his  master.  And  the  misfor- 
tune has  been  that,  in  our  intercourse  with 
these  people,  we  have  not  recognized  how 
natural  and,  from  their  point  of  view,  how 
reasonable  this  is.  "Young  folks  think  old 
folks  are  fools,  but  old  folks  know  that 


CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS   13 

young  folks  are  fools,"  is  a  proverb  on 
which  most  of  us  have  been  reared;  and 
yet  we  forget  that  to  the  Chinese  the  oldest 
of  the  Western  nations  is  very  young,  and 
in  fact  vulgarly  modern. 

You  say  to  your  Chinese  domestic, ' '  Why 
did  you  not  put  salt  in  the  fish-cakes?" 
And  he  answers  you  blandly,  though 
greatly,  it  is  to  be  feared,  to  your  exas- 
peration, "We  do  not  put  salt  in  fish- 
cakes." But  why  should  you  be  angry? 
His  usages  are  some  thousands  of  years 
older  than  yours.  Indeed,  he  knows  very 
well  that  a  few  hundred  years  ago,  so  far  as 
you  or  your  ways  are  concerned,  there  was 
neither  ancestral  habit,  usage,  nor  custom 
to  appeal  to.  And  then,  under  all  these  con- 
ditions, he  can  keep  his  temper,  and,  too 
often,  you  cannot.  Chinese  imperturba- 
bility is  surely  without  its  equal.  The  sto- 
lidity of  our  own  native  Indians  has  been 
supposed  to  be  preeminent,  but  any  one 
who  has  seen  the  Chinese  in  their  own  land 
will  recognize,  I  think,  another  and,  in  its 
way,  a  much  higher  quality  than  this;  for 
ordinarily  there  is  no  sullenness  in  it,  but 
rather  a  bland  and  beaming,  if  often  irri- 
tating, good  nature,  which  is  as  fine  as  it  is 
exasperating.  I  was  witness  of  a  scene  in 
an  interior  city  in  China  which,  as  an  illus- 


14    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

tration  of  this,  was  not  without  its  elements 
of  mortification  for  the  foreigner  who 
watched  it.  A  party  of  Americans  had 
gone  into  a  leading  shop  and  had  selected 
various  articles,  for  which,  after  having  in- 
quired their  prices,  they  offered  a  lump 
sum  far  below  that  asked  for  them.  It  was 
courteously  but  firmly  declined,  with  the  in- 
formation that  the  prices  in  the  establish- 
ment were  fixed,  and  that  the  rule  was  to 
make  no  reductions.  I  should  be  glad  if  I 
could  forget  the  scene  that  followed,  in 
which  the  things  selected  were  rudely  flung 
about,  and  finally  some  of  them  hurled  at 
the  proprietor's  head  with  epithets  more 
forcible  than  refined.  But,  through  the 
whole  odious  scene,  the  shopkeeper  was  un- 
moved, and  his  placid  and  serene  dignity 
undisturbed.  One  who  realized  what  such 
self-command  might  easily  cost  could  not 
but  realize  also  what  an  element  of  power  it 
must  needs  be  in  the  race  and  people  that 
possessed  it. 

We  come  also  here,  I  cannot  but  think, 
upon  one  of  those  large  psychological  facts 
which  go  so  far  to  explain  the  history  of  the 
Chinese  empire.  Think  of  it  for  a  moment ! 
There  it  has  endured,  all  these  thousands  of 
years,  undisturbed  amid  the  tremendous 
revolutions  that  have  upheaved  other  em- 


CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS  15 

pires  and  changed  the  face  of  the  civilized 
globe.  One  need  not  be  unmindful  of  what, 
in  the  progress  of  civilization,  has  else- 
where conie  out  of  national  or  racial  rest- 
lessness, to  recognize  what  a  tremendous 
force  of  conservatism  has  been  the  Chinese 
conviction  that  one  empire  contained  all  in 
the  world  that  was  worth  having,  and  that 
the  only  way  to  look  at  the  rest  of  the  world 
was  to  look  down  from  the  top  of  the  Great 
Wall. 

But  alas  for  such  complacency !  the  Great 
"Wall  is  rapidly  becoming  a  crumbling  ruin, 
and,  even  in  the  regard  of  its  own  people, 
is  plainly  destined  to  be,  before  long,  no 
more  than  a  venerable  historic  memorial. 
The  processes  by  which  this  has  thus  far 
come  to  pass  are  a  part  of  current  history, 
and  I  need  not  do  more  here  than  cursorily 
allude  to  them.  The  first  view  of  the  ordi- 
nary traveler  leads  one,  indeed,  to  suppose 
that  the  changes  that  are  to  transform 
China  are  coming  to  pass  very  rapidly,  and 
the  stranger  entering  the  port  of  Shanghai 
or  Hongkong  concludes  that  the  great  Asi- 
atic empire  has  already  largely  lost  its 
traditional  characteristics.  Nothing  could 
be  more  remote  from  the  facts.  The  treaty 
ports  are  no  more  than  the  homes  and  ware- 
houses of  foreigners— at  least  so  much  of 


16    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEROW 

them  as  at  first  strikes  the  eye;  and  the 
traveler  has  need  to  make  but  a  short  jour- 
ney into  the  interior,  no  matter  where  he 
may  land,  to  find  the  teeming  millions  of 
the  land  untouched  in  any  smallest  degree 
by  the  habits,  the  beliefs,  or  the  ideas  of 
the  outside  barbarian. 

It  is  undoubtedly  true,  however,  that 
this  is  not  likely  to  continue ;  and  thought- 
ful observers  and  older  foreign  residents 
in  China — merchants,  missionaries,  and 
others — were  agreed,  as  far  as  I  encoun- 
tered them,  in  their  impression  that  changes 
hereafter  would  be  likely  to  come  much 
more  rapidly  than  heretofore.  But  though 
prejudice  has  begun  to  yield,  it  is  undoubt- 
edly true  that  it  will  not  yield  rapidly,  and 
that  anything  like  a  progressive  movement 
from  within  is  far  more  improbable  than 
among  any  other  people  in  the  world. 
When  I  entered  China  there  were  most  in- 
teresting rumors  of  the  rise  and  growth  of 
the  young  emperor's  party,  of  the  interest- 
ing personnel  of  its  leading  adherents,  of 
their  wide  reading  of  recent  English  and 
American  literature  dealing  with  questions 
of  political,  social,  and  sociological  interest, 
of  the  aspirations  of  the  youthful  sovereign, 
and  of  the  hopeful  outlook  in  China  for 
something  answering  to  constitutional  and 


CHINESE  TEAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS  17 

representative  government.  But  in  a  few 
months  the  whole  movement  had  appar- 
ently come  to  grief;  the  representatives  of 
the  "Young  China"  party  were  in  hiding 
or  fugitives;  the  dowager  empress,  it  was 
said,  had  put  an  effectual  extinguisher  on 
the  whole  business,  and  our  quondam  guest, 
Li  Hung  Chang,  was  "strengthening  his 
fences"  on  the  old  and  cleverly  corrupt 
lines. 

It  is  inevitable  that  any  great  social  or 
political  movement  in  China  should  be 
marked  by  such  reactions.  For,  first  of  all, 
it  must  be  remembered  that  of  political 
unity,  in  our  sense  of  the  word,  the  empire 
of  China  knows  little  or  nothing.  Its  vast 
and  various  provinces,  extending  from  the 
frigid  to  the  torrid  zone,  have  no  binding 
quality  of  custom,  language,  or  religion. 
The  dynasty  that  rules  is  a  Tatar  dynasty. 
But  the  Manchurian  represents,  rather,  the 
greatest  traditions  of  the  empire.  And  this 
single  illustration  is  sufficient  to  indicate 
what  is  true  of  the  larger  whole.  Those  of 
us  in  America  who  enjoyed  the  acquain- 
tance of  Chinese  students,  merchants,  or 
others  resident  in  our  own  land  during  the 
war  between  China  and  Japan  must  re- 
member the  surprising  apathy  with  which, 
when  we  ventured  to  refer,  sympatheti- 


18    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORKOW 

cally,  to  Chinese  naval  or  military  disas- 
ters, our  expressions  of  sympathy  were  re- 
ceived. We  were  calmly  informed  that  our 
Chinese  friends  did  not  come  from  the 
provinces  that  had  been  invaded  or  the 
coasts  that  were  threatened;  that,  in  fact, 
they  knew  very  little  about  them,  and  evi- 
dently cared  less.  The  burning  resentment 
with  which  an  American  would  hear  that 
foreign  troops  were  landing  upon  the  coast 
of  Florida  or  invading  the  territory  of  Cali- 
fornia, though  none  of  us  might  ever  have 
seen,  and  did  not  know  a  soul  inhabiting, 
the  one  or  the  other,— this,  apparently,  was 
a  sentiment  which  to  a  Chinese  was  incon- 
ceivable. And  yet  it  is  difficult  to  imagine 
how  any  great  national  movement  can  come 
to  pass  until  a  country,  whether  an  empire 
or  a  republic,  has  what  Kossuth  called 
national  solidarity. 

A  still  further  difficulty  in  the  way  of  a 
great  movement  in  the  direction  of  social 
or  political  progress  in  China  is  the  large 
absence  of  any  considerable  discontent 
with  existing  conditions.  The  government 
of  China  has  not  inaptly  been  called  a  gov- 
ernment by  "squeeze."  In  no  community, 
common  as  bribery  or  corruption  is  in  po- 
litical affairs,  especially  in  the  East,  is 
there  so  much  of  it  as  in  China.  It  be- 


CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS  19 

gins  at  the  top  and  extends  all  the  way 
down.  The  emperor  squeezes  the  gover- 
nors of  provinces ;  the  provincial  governors 
squeeze  the  magistrates;  and  the  magis- 
trates squeeze  the  people.  If  you  have  a 
case  before  the  local  justice,  who  is  ordina- 
rily magistrate,  chief  of  police,  and  tax-col- 
lector all  in  one,  you  will  do  well  to  bring 
your  little  present  with  you.  Often  the 
magistrate  takes  a  present  from  both  sides. 
Sometimes  he  has  the  grace  to  return  the 
gift  of  the  man  against  whom  he  decides; 
but  if  you  were  to  quote  to  him  Solomon's 
aphorism  to  the  effect  that '  *  a  gift  blindeth 
the  eyes, ' '  he  would  blandly  assure  you  that 
in  his  country,  on  the  contrary,  it  quickens 
and  clears  the  vision ;  and  the  curious  thing 
about  the  whole  business  is  that,  ordinarily, 
the  suitor  agrees  with  him,  and  that  the 
community  is,  on  the  whole,  entirely  satis- 
fied with  the  present  condition  of  things. 

Of  course  such  a  state  of  affairs  is 
not  universally  prevalent;  and,  equally  of 
course,  the  contrast  between  Chinese  and 
European  communities  in  close  proximity, 
as,  for  example,  at  Hongkong,  Shanghai, 
and  elsewhere,  must  sooner  or  later  impress 
the  intelligent  native,  but  far  less  than  one 
would  suppose.  The  Chinese  hates  our 
cleanliness,  our  wide  streets,  our  police  pro- 


20    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

tecting  the  feeble  and  restraining  personal 
violence ;  and,  like  a  child  in  a  nursery  when 
you  have  put  it  in  order,  thinks  that  you 
have  only  spoiled  what  to  him  was  fair. 
Tell  him  that,  if  he  will  let  it,  civilization- 
Western  civilization — will  drain  his  towns 
and  cleanse  his  dwellings  and  sanitize  his 
whole  life,  where  now  he  cannot  move  or 
breathe  without  filth  and  crowding,  his  an- 
swer is  Mr.  Harold  Skimpole's,  in  "Bleak 
House,"  to  the  friend  who,  on  visiting  his 
apartments,  exclaimed,  "Why,  Harold,  you 
can't  swing  a  cat  here,"  "But  I  don't  want 
to  swing  a  cat  here. ' '  And  that  attitude  of 
mind,  for  the  time  being,  at  any  rate,  is 
an  intellectual  impasse — you  can  go  no 
farther. 

It  cannot  be  disguised,  however,  that  in 
these  regards  there  are  in  China  occasional 
tokens  of  progress,  and  that  they  are  begin- 
ning to  multiply.  As  producing  these, 
there  are  various  causes,  such  as  the  influ- 
ence of  commercial  intercourse,  the  intro- 
duction of  Western  scientific  and  mechani- 
cal inventions,  but  first  of  all,  as  many 
candid  observers  have  frankly  acknow- 
ledged, the  influence  of  the  missionary.  I 
know  how  much  challenge  this  statement 
may  produce,  but  if  the  character  of  the 
witnesses  and  their  testimony  are  consid- 


CHINESE  TEAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS  21 

ered,  I  believe  it  cannot  be  impugned. 
That  there  have  been  mistakes  in  mission- 
ary enterprises  in  China  cannot,  however, 
be  denied,  and  these  might,  I  think,  in  many 
cases  where  they  are  still  persisted  in,  be 
wisely  recognized  and  remedied,  as  they 
easily  may  be.  In  his  interesting  and,  on 
the  whole,  impartial  work  on  the  East,  the 
present  viceroy  of  India,  Lord  Curzon,  al- 
ludes with  considerable  reserve,  but  with 
sufficient  explicitness,  to  some  of  these 
which  have  long  existed.  Generally  they 
refer  to  the  somewhat  careless  disregard  of 
local  or  national  prejudices  by  which  our 
modern  missions  have  been  widely  charac- 
terized. I  confess  I  cannot  see  why  such 
disregard  should  be  indulged  in.  At  home 
and  among  ourselves  we  are  all  agreed  that 
people  cannot  always  do  things  that  are  in 
themselves  entirely  innocent,  if  they  are 
liable  to  be  misunderstood;  and  it  might 
well  be  a  rule  with  all  our  missionary  au- 
thorities that  in  the  matter,  for  example,  of 
the  conventionalisms  of  mission  stations, 
unmarried  women,  traveling  missionaries, 
and  the  like,  the  missionary  should  not  vio- 
late Chinese  social  conventions,  which,  how- 
ever contemptible  they  may  seem  to  us,  are 
too  widely  and  deeply  rooted  in  heathen 
lands  to  be  lightly  disregarded. 


22    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEROW 

Again,  the  modern  missionary  to  a  peo- 
ple whose  nobility  are  its  scholars  should 
be  a  man  of  education  and  of  refinement. 
The  ceremonial  of  Chinese  life  is  doubtless 
often  irksome,  but  a  man  with  not  only  the 
instincts  but  also  the  training  of  a  gentle- 
man—and, unfortunately,  the  two  things 
do  not  always  go  together— will  not  lightly 
disesteem  it. 

And  yet  again,  the  modern  missionary, 
like  his  greatest  predecessor,  the  Apostle 
Paul,  may  wisely  strive  to  understand  and 
respectfully  to  refer  to  the  religion  that  he 
has  come  to  supplant.  If  it  be  true,  as 
Christian  scholars  and  missionaries  have 
owned,  that  "no  student  of  history,  no  ob- 
servant traveler  who  knows  human  nature, 
can  fail  to  be  impressed  to  the  point  of  deep 
awe  with  the  thought  of  the  marvelous  re- 
straining power  which  Chinese  morality  has 
exerted  upon  the  race  from  the  earliest 
times  until  now,"1  it  would  certainly  seem 
to  be  worth  while  for  teachers  from  other 
lands,  who  are  invading  China  with  the 
proclamation  of  a  still  higher  standard  of 
morality,  at  least  respectfully  to  compare 
it  with  that  which  they  aim  to  supplant. 
"It  would  be  hard,"  says  Dr.  Williams,  "to 
overestimate  the  influence  of  Confucius  in 

1  "Chinese  Characteristics,"  pp.  207,  208. 


CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS  23 

his  ideal  princely  scholar,  and  the  power 
for  good  on  his  race  which  this  conception 
has  ever  since  exercised.  The  immeasur- 
able potency,  in  after  ages,  of  the  character 
thus  portrayed,  proves  how  lofty  was  his 
standard;  and  the  national  conscience  has 
ever  since  assented  to  the  justice  of  his  por- 
trait." It  is  another  Christian  scholar  of 
recognized  authority  who  has  said:  ''The 
teaching  of  Confucianism  on  human  duty 
is  wonderful  and  admirable.  It  is  not  per- 
fect, indeed.  But  on  the  last  three  of  the 
four  things  which  Confucius  delighted  to 
teach— letters,  ethics,  devotion  of  soul,  and 
truthfulness — his  utterances  are  in  har- 
mony with  the  law  and  the  gospel.  A  world 
ordered  by  them  would  be  a  beautiful 
world. ' ' 

And  yet  the  most  ardent  champion  of  the 
Chinese  would  not  care  to  maintain  that,  in 
any  such  sense  as  this  writer  used  the  word 
' '  beautiful, ' '  the  empire  of  China  is  a  beau- 
tiful world.  First  of  all,  it  is  rotten  through 
and  through  with  political  corruption.  '  *  To 
what  purpose,"  said  a  Chinese  official  of 
himself  and  his  associates, ' '  would  you  turn 
us  out  of  office?  If  you  did  so,  you  could 
only  replace  us  by  successors  who  would 
steal  more  than  we  do."  Again,  it  is 
weighted  down  by  a  social  and  moral  apa- 


24    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

thy  which  is  all  the  more  appalling  because 
it  still  worships  its  old  teachers — worships 
them  while  it  openly  and  flagrantly  disre- 
gards their  teachings.  There  can  be  no 
moral  debasement  for  a  nation  greater  than 
this. 

And  now,  what  of  its  future  f  As  I  began 
by  saying,  the  doors  that  have  been  so  long 
closed  against  other  nations  are  at  length 
being  slowly  forced  open.  England  and 
Germany  and  France  and  Russia  and  the 
United  States  have  all  discovered  a  keen 
interest  in  this  ancient  people,  and  a  touch- 
ing anxiety,  each  one  of  them,  that  the 
future  of  China  should  not  fall  into  the 
hands  of  any  of  the  others.  With  an  almost 
sublime  force  of  inertia  China  has  resisted 
successive  incursions,  and  has  held  fast  to 
her  ancient  traditions  with  unexampled  te- 
nacity. But  now  at  last  they  are  yielding ; 
and  a  beginning  having  been  made,  no 
one  can  now  predict  how  fast  the  revolu- 
tionary forces  of  Western  civilization  may 
advance.  When  in  Japan  I  was  assured  by 
one  closely  connected  with  a  great  embassy 
at  Peking  and  warmly  interested  in  our 
national  successes  that  the  efforts  prose- 
cuted by  a  group  of  American  capitalists 
with  remarkable  persistency  to  secure  con- 
cessions for  a  great  Chinese  midland  rail- 


CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS  25 

way  were  inevitably  doomed  to  failure.  It 
was  only  three  weeks  later  that,  on  the  jetty 
at  Shanghai,  I  was  informed  by  an  Ameri- 
can gentleman  who  had  been  largely  con- 
cerned in  conducting  the  necessary  negotia- 
tions that  the  whole  business  of  securing 
those  concessions  was  then  happily  and  sat- 
isfactorily concluded. 

Well,  the  rest  will  sooner  or  later  follow, 
not  speedily,  it  may  be,  but  nevertheless  in- 
evitably. When  the  late  Mr.  Brigham' 
Young  gave  in  his  adhesion  to  the  construc- 
tion of  a  branch  of  the  Union  Pacific  Rail- 
way from  Ogden  to  Salt  Lake  City,  a 
shrewd  observer  is  reported  to  have  said, 
''That  means  the  death  of  Mormonism," 
and  he  was  right.  Mormonism,  it  may  be 
urged,  still  survives,  but  only  as  an  extinct 
memorial  of  a  strange  delusion  and  a  very 
clever  leader.  And  little  by  little,  as  mod- 
ern ideas,  fashions,  freedoms,  push  their 
way  into  the  heart  of  China,  the  vast  organ- 
ism will  begin  to  take  on  a  new  life ;  and  as 
the  blood  of  other  peoples  flows  through  its 
traffic,  its  arts,  its  literature,  its  pleasures, 
its  laws  and  customs,  China  will  begin  to 
take  on  not  only  new  manners,  but  new 
morals  and  new  ideals. 

Will  they  be  better  or  worse?     Would 
that  one  could  be  quite  sure  about  that! 


26    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEEOW 

But  alas !  there  cannot  be  racial  tranf usions 
without  the  consequences  that  forever  at- 
tach to  such  processes.  A  clever  writer, 
whose  work  it  was  my  fortune  to  encounter 
for  the  first  time  in  the  Chinese  seas,  pub- 
lished, not  long  ago,  the  story  of  a  poet  who, 
when  lying  mortally  ill,  was  by  a  clever 
suggestion  all  but  miraculously  revived  by 
the  transfusion  of  a  considerable  amount 
of  blood  drawn  from  the  arm  of  a  coster- 
monger.  He  recovers  rapidly,  and  returns 
speedily  to  rude  health.  But,  to  his  dismay, 
he  discovers  not  only  that  he  has  lost  his 
taste  for  claret  and  developed  an  inordinate 
thirst  for  beer,  but  that  his  poetry  has  taken 
on  a  redundancy  of  most  atrocious  slang, 
without  the  employment  of  which  he  finds 
it  impossible  to  write  a  line. 

The  illustration  may  seem  extravagant, 
but  it  certainly  has  a  message  for  Western 
nations  that  are  to-day  dealing  with  an 
effete  civilization.  We  may  give  China 
railways  and  manufactories,  and  a  thou- 
sand cheap  and  clever  inventions  which  are, 
it  sometimes  seems,  the  dominant  note  of 
our  Western  civilization.  We  may  make 
them  discontented  with  their  own  simpler 
customs  and  their  more  frugal  and  infre- 
quent personal  indulgences.  More  than 
this,  we  may  not  only  sell  to  them  the 


CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS  27 

weapons  of  war  and  armed  ships  and  the 
rest,  but  we  may — which  is  quite  another 
thing — teach  them  how  to  use  them.  The 
question  still  remains, — and  it  is,  as  I  shall 
endeavor  to  show,  quite  a  different  question 
in  China  from  what  it  is,  for  example,  in 
India, — what  will  they  do  with  this  new 
knowledge  and  these  new  powers?  Multi- 
ply the  open  doors  into  China,  and  you  must 
needs  multiply  the  doors  that  open  out  of 
China;  and  has  the  American  nation  ever 
realized  that  the  time  may  easily  come  when 
the  question  whether  the  Chinese  will  come 
here,  or  go  or  stay,  may  be  taken  altogether 
out  of  our  keeping,  and  that  by  the  Chinese 
themselves?  I  do  not  underestimate  our 
numbers,  our  wealth,  our  prowess;  but  in 
the  long  run,  in  warfare,  Napoleon's  pro- 
fane maxim  as  to  Providence  and  the 
strongest  battalions  has  in  it  a  grim  ele- 
ment of  truth.  Nobody  appears  to  be  quite 
clear  how  many  people  there  are  in  China; 
but  it  seems  generally  to  be  agreed  that 
there  are  at  least  some  four  hundred  mil- 
lions, and  these  four  hundred  millions  have 
one  very  considerable  element  of  superi- 
ority as  fighters  over  Western  peoples— 
they  are  profoundly  indifferent  to  pain  or 
death.  It  may  be  well  for  us  to  realize 
that,  after  we  have  civilized  them  by  grid- 


28    THE  EAST   OF  TO-DAY   AND  TO-MORROW 

ironing  their  land  with  railways  and  filling 
their  homes  with  "Yankee  notions,"  we 
may  have  to  reckon  with  a  Chinese  dragon 
of  proportions  rather  more  formidable  than 
those  that  are  rampant  at  the  doors  of  Chi- 
nese temples. 

But  surely  there  is  a  nobler  view,  whe- 
ther of  our  opportunities  or  of  their  risks, 
than  this.  However  much  China  may 
want  open  ports  and  machinery  and  im- 
proved sanitary  conditions  in  streets  and 
houses,  she  wants  some  other  things  in- 
finitely more.  One  of  these  is  the  awaken- 
ing of  her  human  sympathies.  In  the  ab- 
sence or  paralysis  of  these  the  testimony 
of  those  who  know  her  best  would  seem  to 
show  that  she  has  no  match.  It  is  enough 
to  be  seized  with  a  contagious  disease  in 
China  to  be  practically  abandoned.  The 
sick  person  is  placed  in  a  solitary  room  with 
a  jug  of  water;  the  door  is  shut  and  fas- 
tened, and  the  only  attention  he  gets  is 
twice  a  day,  when  some  one  peers  in 
through  a  narrow  opening  and  prods  the 
patient  with  a  pole  to  see  whether  he  is  not 
yet  dead.  The  author  of  "Chinese  Char- 
acteristics," who  has  drawn  for  us,  I  be- 
lieve, much  the  most  vivid  and  accurate 
portrait  of  the  Chinese  people,  relates  how 
it  is  customary  for  one  afflicted  with  any 


CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS  29 

natural  or  acquired  blemish  or  defect  to  be 
reminded  of  the  fact.1  One  of  the  mildest 
forms  of  this  practice  is  that  in  which  the 
peculiarity  is  employed  as  a  description 
in  such  a  way  as  to  attract  public  atten- 
tion. "Great  elder  brother  with  the  pock- 
marks,"  says  an  attendant  in  a  dispensary 
to  a  patient,  "from  what  village  do  you 
come?"  It  will  not  be  singular  if  the  man 
whose  eyes  are  afflicted  with  strabismus 
hears  an  observation  to  the  effect  that 
"when  the  eyes  look  asquint  the  heart  is 
askew,"  or  if  the  man  who  has  no  hair  is 
reminded  that  "out  of  ten  bald  men  nine 
are  deceitful,  and  the  other  would  be  also 
if  he  were  not  a  fool."  In  this  instance 
there  is  not  only  that  indifference  which  is 
careless  how  it  gives  pain,  but  that  insensi- 
bility which  is  unable  to  perceive  how  in- 
consistent is  such  unfeeling  speech  with 
even  the  most  elemental  principles  of  good 
manners.  And  marching  with  such  charac- 
teristics is  the  national  indifference  to  the 
sufferings  of  children,  especially  if  they  be 
girls,  and  to  women,  invariably  if  they  be 
daughters-in-law.  With  an  enormous  cere- 
monial in  all  their  social  intercourse,  the 
neglect  or  impatience  of  which  on  the  part 
of  foreigners  fills  the  Chinese  with  an  im- 

1  "  Chinese  Characteristics,"  p.  197. 


30    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

mense  contempt,  there  is  ordinarily  the 
most  profound  indifference  concerning  the 
griefs  and  misfortunes  that  touch  anybody 
else  than  their  own  family. 

And,  along  with  this  characteristic,  in 
such  marked  contrast  with  the  ruling  ideas 
in  Christian  lands,  there  is  among  the  Chi- 
nese one  supreme  want  which,  whether  in 
art,  in  literature,  or  in  human  conduct,  is 
equally  conspicuous.  They  are  a  people 
with  their  eyes  in  the  back  of  their  heads. 
Their  ideals,  so  far  as  they  have  any,  are 
all  behind  them.  They  know  nothing  of 
a  divine  discontent.  Complacency,  abso- 
lute, invariable,  all-pervading,  is  the  su- 
preme note  of  Chinese  life  and  character. 
That  a  thing  was  is  reason  sufficient  to  the 
ordinary  Chinese  mind  that  it  should  con- 
tinue to  be ;  and  that  anybody  who  has  not 
been  hired  to  do  so  should  concern  himself 
with  even  a  curiosity,  much  more  an  en- 
deavor, that  it  should  be  better,  is  to  the 
Chinese  mind  only  an  excellent  joke.  M. 
Hue,  in  his  masterly  work  on  China  and  the 
Chinese,  relates  that  in  1857,  at  the  period 
of  the  death  of  the  Emperor  Jao  Kuang,  he 
was  "  traveling  on  the  road  from  Peking, 
and  one  day, ' '  he  says,  '  *  when  we  had  been 
taking  tea  at  an  inn  in  company  with  some 
Chinese  citizens,  we  tried  to  get  up  a  little 


CHINESE   TKAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS  31 

political  discussion.  We  spoke  of  the  re- 
cent death  of  the  emperor,  an  important 
event  which,  of  course,  must  have  interested 
everybody.  We  expressed  our  anxiety  on 
the  subject  of  the  succession  to  the  imperial 
throne,  the  heir  to  which  was  not  yet  pub- 
licly announced.  'Who  knows,'  said  we, 
'which  of  these  sons  of  the  emperor  will 
have  been  appointed  to  succeed  him?  If 
it  should  be  the  elder,  will  he  pursue 
the  same  system  of  government?  If  the 
younger,  he  is  still  very  young,  and  it  is 
said  that  there  are  contrary  influences — two 
opposing  parties— at  court.  To  which  will 
he  lean?'  We  put  forward,  in  short,  all 
kinds  of  hypotheses,  in  order  to  stimulate 
these  good  citizens  to  make  some  observa- 
tion. But  to  all  our  suggestions  and  in- 
quiries they  replied  by  shaking  their  heads, 
puffing  out  whiffs  of  smoke,  and  taking 
great  gulps  of  tea.  This  apathy  was  becom- 
ing almost  provoking,  when  one  of  them, 
getting  up  from  his  seat,  came  and  laid  his 
two  hands  on  our  shoulders  in  a  manner 
quite  paternal,  and  said,  smiling  rather 
ironically:  'Listen  to  me,  my  friend.  Why 
should  you  trouble  your  head  and  fatigue 
your  heart  with  all  these  vain  surmises? 
The  mandarins  have  to  attend  to  affairs  of 
state ;  they  are  paid  for  it.  Let  them  earn 


32    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOREOW 

their  money,  then.  But  don't  let  us  trouble 
ourselves  about  what  does  not  concern  us. 
We  should  be  great  fools  to  want  to  do  po- 
litical business  for  nothing.'  'That  is  very 
conformable  to  reason, '  said  the  rest  of  the 
company;  and  they  then  pointed  out  to  us 
that  our  tea  was  getting  cold  and  that  our 
pipes  were  out." 

I  submit  that  here  M.  Hue  has  not  suffi- 
ciently stated,  if  he  sufficiently  recognized, 
another  element  in  the  reserve  of  his  Chi- 
nese auditors,  which  courtesy  may  have  re- 
strained them  from  expressing.  What  busi- 
ness was  it  of  his  I  Who  were  these  imper- 
tinent strangers  and  foreigners,  the  Chinese 
doubtless  said  to  themselves,  who  pushed 
their  way  into  a  country  that  neither  invited 
nor  welcomed  them,  and  insisted  on  dis- 
cussing its  domestic  affairs  in  a  promis- 
cuous company  in  an  inn?  And  if,  as  has 
since  happened,  the  inquisitive  foreigners 
became  more  and  more  numerous;  if  they 
not  only  challenged  Chinese  customs,  but 
persisted  in  introducing  their  own;  if  they 
ran  railways  through  Chinese  graveyards, 
thus  outraging  the  most  sacred  traditions 
and  beliefs  of  the  people  among  whom  they 
ruthlessly  forced  their  way,  is  it  any  won- 
der that  among  that  slow-moving,  slow- 
thinking,  but  intensely  conservative  and 


CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS  33 

exclusive  people  there  has  grown  up  a  re- 
sentment of  foreign  ways,  and  a  hostility  to 
all  foreign  persons,  which  has  at  length 
found  its  expression  in  acts  of  violence  and 
bloodshed  at  which  the  whole  civilized 
world  to-day  stands  aghast? 

That  a  religious  hatred  is  also  a  large 
element  in  this  hostility  there  can  be  no 
smallest  doubt;  nor,  I  think  it  must  be 
owned,  need  there  be  any  wonder.  Not 
long  ago,  at  the  two-hundredth  anniver- 
sary of  the  Venerable  Society  for  the  Prop- 
agation of  the  Gospel  in  Foreign .  Parts, 
in  London,  Lord  Salisbury  delivered  an 
address  which  was  much  criticized  at  the 
moment  for  its  somewhat  cautionary  if  not 
fault-finding  tone.  I  confess  I  wondered 
when  I  read  it  that  he  had  not  put  his  cau- 
tions a  good  deal  more  strongly.  Briefly, 
the  situation  is  this.  Missionaries  from 
Christian  countries  go  into  heathen  lands, 
and,  while  resident  or  going  about  in  them, 
demand  the  protection  of  the  consuls,  min- 
isters, and  ambassadors  of  their  own  coun- 
try, to  which  they  are  undoubtedly  entitled 
as  long  as  they  are  going  to  and  fro  on  their 
lawful  errands.  But  suppose  this  interven- 
tion is  invoked  when  they  are  violating  the 
traditions  and— doubtless  often  uncon- 
sciously—putting contempt  on  very  tender 

3 


34    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOBEOW 

and  sacred  usages  or  beliefs ;  and  suppose, 
still  further,  that  this  intervention  is  in- 
voked and  even  demanded  not  only  for 
themselves,  but  for  their  converts.  These 
converts,  it  must  be  remembered,  are  Chi- 
nese subjects,  amenable  to  Chinese  law; 
and  yet  a  recent  correspondent1  from  China 
tells  us  that  "the  Roman  Catholic  Chris- 
tians were  often  oppressed  by  non-Chris- 
tian members  of  their  community,  and  as 
a  result  the  church  appointed  two  of  her 
priests  to  attend  to  no  other  duties  except 
the  investigation  of  evidence  in  case  of  liti- 
gation, and  the  conduct  of  such  cases  as 
they  thought  unjust  before  the  official.  The 
fact  that  they  had  official  rank,  and  the 
other  very  important  fact  that  they  were 
foreigners,  added  to  their  power,  and  they 
were  thus  able  to  meet  the  official  not  only 
on  his  own  ground,  but  with  the  additional 
power  of  understanding  foreign  law.  The 
Christians  were  therefore  enabled  to  obtain 
justice.'* 

Now,  that  is  a  very  innocent-looking 
paragraph,  but  if  one  looks  a  little  closer  he 
will  see  how  much  it  really  means.  In  con- 
nection with  certain  missions,  it  seems, 
there  is  a  privileged  class.  They  are  not 
amenable  to  the  ordinary  jurisdiction  of  the 

1Mr.  I.  T.  Headland,  in  "Harper's  Weekly." 


CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS  35 

ordinary  civil  authority.  They  have  suc- 
ceeded in  having  created  for  themselves  a 
sort  of  extraordinary  civil  authority  for 
their  own  people,  consisting  of  a  foreign 
priesthood,— foreign,  at  any  rate,  in  their 
commission  and  allegiance, — whether  hap- 
pening to  be  Chinese  or  French  in  their 
race  and  lineage  is  of  small  consequence. 
These  persons  are  described  as  having 
"official  rank,"  that  is,  Chinese  official 
rank;  some  of  them  are  reported  to  be  in 
authority  practically  equivalent  to  that  of 
a  viceroy ;  and  they  can  take  a  criminal  out 
of  the  ordinary  processes  of  the  civil  law, 
as  applied  to  natives  who  are  not  Chris- 
tians, and  deal  with  him  at  their  own  dis- 
cretion. 

Let  us  for  a  moment  turn  such  a  situa- 
tion "the  other  end  foremost."  Let  us 
suppose  it  to  be  the  Buddhists  of  India  who 
are  sending  missionaries  to  America;  it  is 
said  that  they  have  set  about  doing  so. 
They  ingratiate  themselves  with  the  civil 
authorities,  and  get  certain  of  their  number 
appointed  police  magistrates.  There  is  a 
considerable  conversion  of  native  Ameri- 
cans to  the  religion  of  Buddha,  and  these, 
when  they  fail  to  pay  their  taxes  or  other- 
wise to  obey  the  law,  are  tried  by  Buddhist 
magistrates,  who  take  care  that  they  are 


36    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOKROW 

always  very  gently  dealt  with.  I  do  not  say 
that  there  may  not  have  been  in  China 
wrong  and  injustice  toward  Christian  con- 
verts. But  I  do  say  that  if  such  methods 
of  protecting  Buddhist  converts  were  to 
obtain  among  us  it  would  provoke  an  upris- 
ing, which  we  for  our  part  would  maintain 
to  be  abundantly  justified  by  the  conditions 
which  had  provoked  it. 

It  is  not  necessary  for  me,  I  hope,  to  add 
that  there  is  undoubtedly  a  great  deal  of 
missionary  work  in  China  which  is  not 
open,  on  account  of  the  adroitness  or  usur- 
pations of  its  methods,  to  any  criticism 
whatsoever.  But  even  such  work,  because 
it  is  the  work  of  foreigners,  must  reckon 
with  that  inveterate  hostility  to  foreigners 
of  which  no  one  who  has  not  seen  it  close 
at  hand  can  have  any  adequate  conception. 
That  the  Chinese  should  hate  Americans, 
who,  having  shut  the  American  door  inex- 
orably in  their  faces,  have  now  turned 
around  to  force  open  the  Chinese  doors, 
ought  not  to  be  to  us  a  matter  of  surprise. 
That  that  hatred  extends,  and  for  reasons 
that  they  do  not  disguise,  to  all  foreigners, 
no  one  who  reads  the  following  extract 
from  the  " North  China  Daily  News," 
which  I  encountered  in  Shanghai  in  No- 
vember last,  can  doubt. 


CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS  37 

(Translated  from  a  leading  native  paper.) 

THE   INSATIABLE   GREED   OF   WESTERN   NATIONS. 

LET  CHINA  BEWARE  ! 

FOREIGNERS  have  for  many  years  united  them- 
selves, and  have  been  laying  their  plans  with 
regard  to  China.  Originally  they  availed  them- 
selves of  the  plea  of  the  mutual  advantages  aris- 
ing out  of  commerce  to  induce  China  to  open 
treaty  ports  at  which  they  could  trade.  Next, 
under  pretexts  of  various  losses,  in  order  to  en- 
rich themselves,  they  compelled  China  to  pay 
certain  indemnities.  To-day  they  are  mooting 
the  questions  of  railways  and  mines,  and  using 
them  as  a  pretext  to  get  our  country  from  us. 
Their  purpose  is,  trusting  in  their  strength,  to 
partition  out  and  divide  among  themselves  our 
country.  Like  chess-players,  who  place  their 
pieces  preparatory  to  attacking  and  vanquish- 
ing the  enemy,  they  have  arranged  their  forces; 
like  fishermen,  who  first  of  all  silently  throw 
the  net  into  the  water  and  then  gather  out  the 
fish,  they  are  preparing  to  catch  China.  They 
believe  they  have,  and  perhaps  do  possess,  the 
ability  to  divide  China  like  a  watermelon.  They 
have  already  seized  and  they  hold  the  most  im- 
portant positions,  with  a  view  to  this  end.  First 
by  insinuating  that  mutual  gain  would  result 
therefrom,  they  have  arranged  treaties  with  us, 
which  was  obviously  the  beginning  of  our  calam- 
ities. 


38    THE  EAST  OP  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOREOW 

In  the  present  dispute  between  Russia  and 
England,  ruin  for  China  lurks.  In  reality  it  is 
only  a  quarrel  about  the  partition  of  China.  In- 
deed, the  surrounding  circumstances  are  con- 
verging to  this  partition.  Foreigners  are  ever 
scheming  for  this.  Their  discussions  tend  to  the 
same  results.  The  signs  of  this  impending  ca- 
lamity, moreover,  are  all  too  apparent  within 
our  own  borders.  But  the  opportunity  to  parti- 
tion and  snatch  from  us  our  country  will  be 
made  by  outsiders.  If,  then,  China  is  to  regain 
her  original  power,  she  must  arouse  herself  and 
mend  her  ways.  If  she  exerts  herself  to  her  full 
ability,  she  will  then  be  able  to  foil  the  strate- 
gies of  her  enemies ;  if  she  will  but  exert  herself 
to  any  extent,  she  can  ward  off,  for  a  time  at 
least,  the  actual  partition.  Then  the  violence 
with  which  foreigners  insult  us,  although  it  ap- 
pears to  be  all-powerful,  will  turn  out  not  to  be 
so,  and  our  distress  will  really  be  no  distress  at 
all.  But  alas!  there  is  a  fatal  tranquillity  that 
arises  from  a  condition  of  coma,  a  darkness  aris- 
ing out  of  a  state  of  crass  ignorance,  so  that, 
though  dangers  like  falling  mountains  threaten 
us,  many  seem  unable  to  observe  the  impending 
ruin.  True,  there  are  earnest  scholars  of  the 
empire,  but  they  only  smite  the  breast  and  weep 
tears  of  blood  more  bitterly,  indeed,  than  in  the 
days  of  the  Tribulation  of  Ki.  Let  our  reader 
then  clearly  understand  that  the  attitude  of  all 
foreigners  toward  China  is  guided  by  one  prin- 
ciple; they  unite  their  energies  and  combine 
their  forces  in  order  to  gratify  their  one  ambi- 


CHINESE  TRAITS  AND  WESTERN  BLUNDERS  39 

tion,  which  is  to  partition  and  rob  us  of  our 
country. 

Such  has  been  the  cry  with  which,  of  late, 
China,  north  and  south,  has  rung.  We  have 
seen  and  are  seeing  some  of  the  bloody 
fruits  of  this  inflamed  national  hatred. 
May  a  large  wisdom  and  a  temper  other 
than  that  of  mere  revenge  deal  with  the 
Chinese  question  as  the  essential  equities 
involved  in  it  demand.  We  are  told  that 
the  destiny  of  China  is  to  be  partitioned  up 
among  the  great  powers.  There  could  not 
be  a  more  stupid  or  shameless  policy.  A 
nation,  like  a  man,  has  a  right  to  be  until 
she  has  demonstrated  unmistakably  her  in- 
competence to  administer  her  own  affairs 
with  equal  justice  to  all.  It  cannot  be 
maintained  that  China  has  so  far  descended 
the  path  of  national  decay  and  disintegra- 
tion. She  is  stained  with  a  long  record  of 
dishonored  and  discredited  officials,  cor- 
rupt, mercenary,  and  unscrupulous.  Alas ! 
is  the  record  of  other  people  unstained  in 
this  regard?  She  has  been  guilty  of  the 
gravest  crimes  against  international  rights 
and  comities.  Let  her  be  punished  for 
them  as  she  deserves.  But  let  not  the  mad 
acts  of  ignorant  and  inflamed  revolution- 
ists be  made  the  pretext  for  pulling  down 


40    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

a  venerable  and  historic  civilization,  whose 
younger  and  worthier  sons  are  just  now 
turning  toward  the  light.  Hands  off,  gen- 
tlemen, kings,  emperors,  and  presidents, 
until  a  people,  stirred  at  length  by  the 
vision  of  nobler  ideals,  shall  show  us  what 
they  can  do  for  their  own  regeneration. 


II 

THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE 
PHILIPPINES 


II 

THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE 
PHILIPPINES 

IN  Le  Sage's  "Bachelor  of  Salamanca" 
th^re  is  recounted  a  series  of  stirring 
incidents  which  issue  in  the  arrival  of  the 
hero,  Don  Cherubin  de  la  Ronda,  in  Mexico, 
in  which,  for  a  time,  he  leads  a  vagrant  life, 
and  in  which,  for  a  still  longer  time,  he 
holds  an  official  position  of  considera- 
ble importance.  The  book  is  interesting, 
though  characteristically  coarse  reading, 
and  as  throwing  a  very  helpful  side-light 
upon  not  only  usages,  but  standards,  cere- 
monious, commercial,  or  moral,  of  the  Span- 
ish rule  in  Mexico,  it  is  of  enduring  value. 
For  nothing  can  be  plainer  to  one  read- 
ing the  volume  than  that,  to  use  a  modern 
vulgarism,  the  Spaniards  were  not  in  Mex- 
ico, or  in  any  other  colony,  "for  their 
health."  The  ordinary  term  of  office  of  a 
governor  was  five  years,  and,  however  poor 
a  man  came  to  the  colony,  he  was  expected 
to  leave  it  a  man  of  independent  fortune. 

43 


44    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEROW 

When  Don  Cherubin  de  la  Ronda's  friend 
and  patron,  the  Count  de  Gelves,  retires 
from  the  viceroyalty  of  New  Spain,  the 
former  relates  that  "finally  we  set  out  from 
Mexico,  and  it  may  be  said  that  on  the  day 
of  our  departure  we  presented  a  spectacle 
to  the  Americans  which  gave  ample  scope 
for  their  curses.  The  wags,  at  seeing  two 
hundred  mules  loaded  with  bales,  mostly  of 
silver,  made  themselves  a  little  merry  at 
our  expense,  and  we  repaired  with^  their 
money  to  Vera  Cruz"— which  goes  af  good 
way  to  explain  the  long-suffering  patience 
of  the  natives  under  Spanish  rule. 

And  no  estimate  of  the  Philippine,  any 
more  than  of  the  original  Mexican  situa- 
tion, or  of  the  people  with  whom  chiefly 
the  former  is  concerned,  can  be  even  mod- 
erately intelligent  which  leaves  this  feature 
out.  Spain  found  the  islands  as  the  fruit 
of  that  fine  spirit  of  adventure  which  will 
forever  preserve  her  name  illustrious. 
Columbus  was  not  a  greater  hero  nor  a 
more  daring  explorer  in  his  way  than  was 
Magellan  in  his.  But  neither  Magellan  nor 
the  men  who  followed  him,  as  indeed  such 
an  incident  in  their  history  unmistakably 
reveals,  rose  above  the  spirit  of  their  times. 
That  the  aims  of  the  Spanish-American 
and  Spanish-Pacific  ventures  were  not 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES       45 

those  of  colonization  so  much  as  of  mere 
conquest  is  plain  enough.  True,  the  church 
went  in  the  ships  with  the  soldiers,  and  the 
priest  and  his  paraphernalia  were  often 
landed  first  of  all.  But,  without  impugning 
the  spirit  or  the  purposes  of  the  reverend 
clergy  of  that  day,  it  is  enough  to  say  that, 
having  startled  the  simple  savages  among 
whom  they  landed  with  their  unfamiliar 
ceremonies,  they  seem  to  have  done  little 
or  nothing  to  teach  or  to  protect  them. 
When  Manila  was  occupied  by  the  Span- 
iards the  historian  tells  us  that  they  first  of 
all  established  a  system  of  taxes  to  be  im- 
posed upon  the  natives,  and  later  built  hos- 
pitals for  their  own  soldiers,  penitentiaries 
for  the  punishment  of  the  recalcitrant,  and 
war-ships  to  enforce  their  decrees.  Of 
schools  and  the  development  of  industries 
we  hear  nothing,  nor,  indeed,  do  the  Span- 
iards seem  to  have  contemplated  the  latter 
as  practicable  among  the  untutored  sav- 
ages. And  yet,  later  experience  has  dem- 
onstrated that  in  handicrafts,  the  mechanic 
arts,  and  kindred  industrial  pursuits  the 
native  Filipino  has  exhibited  unusual  apti- 
tude. The  factory-hand  of  to-day,  in  such 
cotton-mills  as  I  visited,  is  usually  a  lad  or 
a  girl  under  seventeen  or  eighteen  years  of 
age.  Yet  I  was  assured  by  their  Scotch 


46    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEROW 

overseer  that  they  learned  their  somewhat 
delicate  and  intricate  tasks,  which  involved 
the  manipulation  of  machinery  easily  dis- 
arranged or  misdirected,  in  about  half  the 
time  that  a  European  boy  or  girl  would 
acquire  the  same  knowledge. 

But  of  development  along  lines  that,  to 
our  American  thinking,  are  those  which 
alone  are  legitimate  in  the  work  of  coloniza- 
tion, it  is  plain  that  the  Spanish  conquerors 
had  no  conception,  or,  if  they  had,  regarded 
it  with  not  the  slightest  interest.  The  pages 
of  Philippine  history,  from  the  year  (1521) 
when  Magellan  landed  on  the  north  coast  of 
Mindanao,  in  the  southern  Philippines, 
down  to  our  own  time,  have,  indeed,  little 
else  to  record  than  successive  struggles  for 
a  group  of  islands  which  the  most  cursory 
inspection  proved  to  be  rich  in  natural  re- 
sources, and  for  the  possession  of  which, 
before  a  great  while,  Chinese,  Dutch,  and 
English  in  turn  vigorously  and  more  or  less 
successfully  contended.  It  would  be  in- 
teresting to  speculate  upon  what  would 
have  been  the  history  of  the  islands  if  the 
British  fleet  which,  under  Admiral  Cornish, 
on  September  22,  1762,  arrived  before  Ma- 
nila had  maintained  the  hold  which  the  land 
forces  under  General  Draper,  a  little  later, 
established  there,  and  which  was  only  re- 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES       47 

laxed  when,  after  the  ratification  of  the 
treaty  of  Paris  in  February,  1763,  Manila 
was  evacuated. 

It  is  undoubtedly  probable  that,  had  Brit- 
ish control  of  the  islands  been  maintained, 
their  history  would  have  been  more  pros- 
perous and  peaceful  than  it  subsequently 
proved  to  be.  Whatever  we  may  deny  to 
her,  England  has  the  genius  of  coloniza- 
tion. And  yet,  if,  in  1762,  she  had  retained 
possession  of  the  Philippines,  it  is  by  no 
means  certain  that  she  would  have  ruled 
them  more  easily  than  did  Spain.  Britain's 
more  signal  triumph  as  a  colonizer  has  been 
in  India,  and  in  India  she  has  the  difficult 
task  of  dealing  with  different  tribes,  rulers, 
and  tongues.  But  the  local  divergences  in 
these  respects  can  in  no  degree  be  compared 
with  what  Spain  found  in  the  Philippines, 
nor  can  the  original  conditions  be  consid- 
ered at  all  similar.  India  had  a  civilization, 
however  we  may  disesteem  much  that  dis- 
tinguished it.  It  had  a  religion  which,  how- 
ever much  of  it  was  clouded  by  supersti- 
tion, was  still  the  parent  and  propagator  of 
great  ideas.  But  the  civilization  of  the  na- 
tive tribes  of  the  Philippines  was  utterly 
unworthy  of  any  such  name,  and  their  re- 
ligious ideas  were  at  once  pagan  and  pue- 
rile. Mr.  Foreman,  to  whose  admirable 


48    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

work  1  I  shall  have  occasion  more  than  once 
to  refer,  relates  that  in  the  year  1881  he 
had  occasion  to  visit  a  village  in  Upper 
Pampanga  which  the  Spanish  authorities 
had  established  as  a  kind  of  model  for  the 
elevation  and  instruction  of  the  Negritos. 
They  were  housed  in  bamboo  and  palm-leaf 
huts  of  excellent  sanitary  construction,  and 
supplied  with  food  and  clothing  for  a  year, 
with  instruction  in  tilling  the  soil  and  other 
industries.  But  at  the  end  of  a  year  or  two 
they  had  fled  to  the  mountains,  and  no  per- 
suasion could  bring  them  back  to  anything 
that  separated  them  from  the  low  animal- 
ism and  the  nomadic  habits  which  were 
their  ancestral  inheritance.  Now,  this,  it 
must  be  borne  in  mind,  was  after  Spain  had 
been  in  possession  of  the  Philippines  for 
more  than  three  hundred  years. 

It  is  quite  true,  of  course,  that  this  has 
not  been  the  history  of  Spanish  colonization 
in  all  the  islands  or  in  connection  with  all 
the  tribes.  I  shall  never  forget  the  pro- 
found impression  which  was  made  upon  me 
when  I  entered  the  harbor  of  Manila.  The 
spectacle  of  solid  and  stately  structures, 
forts,  arsenals,  municipal  halls,  churches, 
viceregal  palaces,  and  the  rest,  was  worthy 
of  any  port  of  Spain,  distinctly  recalling, 

l"  The  Philippine  Islands,"  by  John  Foreman,  F.R.O.S. 


THE  PEOBLEM  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES       49 

indeed,  impressions  which  I  had  received 
when  entering  the  harbors  of  Cartagena, 
Malaga,  and  Barcelona.  And  when  one 
goes  to  and  fro  in  Luzon,  and  to  a  greater 
or  less  degree  in  others  of  the  Philippine 
Islands,  he  sees  manifold  material  evi- 
dences of  commercial,  municipal,  civic,  and 
ecclesiastical  activity.  The  question  at 
once  arises,  Why  has  it  accomplished  so 
little,  and  why,  on  the  whole,  is  the  type  of 
civilization  which  one  finds  in  the  Philip- 
pines so  low  and  in  some  instances  so  ex- 
ceptionally debased?  These  are  questions 
which  the  nation  which  has  assumed  the 
burden  of  governing  these  islands  has  need 
to  ask  and  to  press  until  it  shall  have  an 
answer.  In  that  answer,  if  it  is  soluble  at 
all,  we  shall  find  the  solution  of  the  Philip- 
pine problem. 

It  is  partially  answered  as  soon  as  we 
have  intelligently  recognized  the  elements 
that  went  to  make  up  the  Spanish  civiliza- 
tion. Whatever  Spain  might  have  hoped  to 
do  or  to  be  to  the  Philippines,  she  could 
not  have  expected  to  create  among  them  a 
social  order  or  to  introduce  and  establish 
moral  standards  that  were  higher  than  her 
own.  Those  that  she  did  introduce  were 
translated  to  the  people  whose  soil  she  in- 
vaded and  whose  tribes  she  undertook  to 


60    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOREOW 

rule  by  four  powerful  agencies :  the  army, 
the  civil  ruler,  the  church,  and  commerce. 
In  speaking  of  them  I  shall  content  myself 
mainly  with  the  testimony  of  her  own  wit- 
nesses. 

And,  first,  the  army.  Substantially  the 
first  knowledge  that  the  Filipino  had  of  the 
Spaniard  was  as  a  soldier.  The  men  who 
came  in  ships  and  who  first  landed  on  his 
shores  came  as  the  servants  of  those  who 
sailed  in  them  as  the  conquering  hosts  of 
Spain,  and  when,  as  at  Cebu,  these  con- 
querors first  landed,  they  disclosed  the  pur- 
pose for  which  they  had  come  by  seizing 
and  sacking  the  first  town  that  they  entered. 
The  natives  were  declared  Spanish  sub- 
jects, their  king  was  dethroned,  and  the 
grandson  of  the  Spanish  leader,  the  daring 
Legaspi,  was  despatched  to  take  possession 
of  Luzon.  The  Spanish  historian  has  ob- 
scured this  latter  transaction  by  chronicles 
that  are  curiously  contradictory,  but  he  may 
believe  who  can  that  the  native  rulers  of 
Luzon  surrendered  their  territory,  their  in- 
dependence, and  their  tribute  to  invading 
foreigners  who  used  no  other  weapons  than 
persuasive  speech.  From  the  beginning, 
though  the  records  were  written  by  Spanish 
hands,  the  pages  of  Philippine  history  are 
stained  with  blood,  chiefly  the  blood  of  in- 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES       51 

nocent  and  guileless  savages,  entrapped, 
terrified,  robbed,  and  ravished  by  civilized 
and  nominally  Christian  soldiers.  It  is  not 
altogether  surprising  that  their  descen- 
dants do  not  welcome  the  advent  of  the 
Christian  soldier  to-day. 

Naturally  enough,  conquest  was  followed, 
for  a  time  at  any  rate,  by  a  rule  that  was 
largely  military.  As  the  colony  was  di- 
vided and  subdivided  into  provinces  and 
military  districts,  the  chief  authority  was 
usually  a  military  officer  who  gladly  re- 
signed his  rank  for  an  office  which,  while 
it  ordinarily  had  attached  to  it  a  stipend 
of  but  three  hundred  dollars,  afforded  in- 
definite opportunities  for  personal  emolu- 
ment. In  his  ' '  Noticias  de  Filipinos, ' '  Don 
Eusebio  Mazorca,  in  an  unedited  manu- 
script,1 dated  1840,  in  the  archives  of  the 
Bauan  Convent,  Province  of  Batangas, 
states  that  "there  are  candidates  up  to  the 
grade  of  Brigadier  who  relinquish  a  $3000 
salary  to  pursue  their  hopes  and  projects 
in  [provincial]  Governorship,"  and  of  the 
qualifications  for  these  positions  T.  Comin, 
in  1810,  wrote:  "In  order  to  be  a  Chief  of 
a  Province  in  these  Islands,  no  training  or 
knowledge  or  special  services  are  neces- 
sary. .  .  .  It  is  quite  a  common  thing 

1  Foreman's  "  The  Philippine  Islands,"  p.  230. 


52    THE  EAST  OP  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORKOW 

to  see  a  barber  or  a  Governor's  lackey,  a 
sailor  or  a  deserter,  suddenly  transformed 
into  an  Alcalde,  Administrator,  and  Cap- 
tain of  the  forces  of  a  populous  province 
without  any  counsellor  but  his  rude  un- 
derstanding, or  any  guide  but  his  passions 
—'sin  otro  consejero  que  su  rudo  entendi- 
miento,  ni  mas  guia  que  sus  pasiones.'  m 
Comin  was  subsequently  Spanish  consul- 
general  at  Lisbon. 

With  absolute  power,  with  a  native  in- 
capacity even  to  conceive  of  an  equitable 
exercise  of  authority,  ignorant,  self-willed, 
and  wholly  irresponsible,  it  can  easily  be 
imagined  that  this  military  rule  did  little  to 
win  or  elevate  the  people  whom  it  pre- 
tended to  govern.  Our  own  American 
theory,  still  widely  prevalent— more  shame 
on  us!— in  certain  parts  of  our  own  land, 
that  "a  negro  has  no  rights  that  a  white 
man  is  bound  to  respect/'  was  apparently 
the  highest  view  of  his  duty  that  the  ordi- 
nary Spanish  military  officer  was  capable 
of  conceiving.  To  amuse  and  indulge  him- 
self at  whatever  cost  to  the  community  over 
whom  he  was  placed,  and  then  to  wring 
from  the  conquered  province  the  last  peseta 
that  could  be  squeezed  from  the  peasant 
whom  he  terrorized,— this  was  the  founda- 

1  Foreman's  "  The  Philippine  Islands,"  p.  231. 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES       53 

tion  for  civil  rule  in  the  Philippines  which 
was  laid  by  that  military  rule  which  pre- 
ceded it. 

It  is  not  greatly  surprising,  therefore, 
that  when  the  civil  ruler  took  over  the  tasks 
of  the  military  governor  the  situation  was 
not  greatly  improved.  He  was  the  creation 
of  the  Spanish  government  at  Madrid,  and 
that  conception  of  the  object  of  his  appoint- 
ment which  I  have  indicated  at  the  begin- 
ning of  these  pages  was  undoubtedly  a 
leading,  if  not  the  principal,  motive.  The 
appointments  to  places  of  trust  and  respon- 
sibility, such  as  were  those  of  military  gov- 
ernors, alcaldes,  or  other  prominent  magis- 
trates, were  in  the  gift  of  the  Spanish 
cabinet,  and  when  a  cabinet  officer  went  out, 
his  favorites  went  out  with  him.  The  sys- 
tem, in  a  word,  was  our  own,  save  as  the  lat- 
ter is  feebly  and  intermittently  qualified  by 
civil-service  regulations ;  and  the  uses  which 
a  government  officer  made  of  his  place,  if 
more  glaring  and  unblushing,  especially, 
for  example,  in  cities,  than  those  which  we 
are  familiar  with  at  home,  were  of  substan- 
tially the  same  character.  The  authority 
that  I  have  already  quoted,  Don  Eusebio 
Mazorca,1  describing  the  official  processes 
in  this  connection,  says:  "The  Governor 

1  Foreman's  "  The  Philippine  Islands,"  p.  242. 


54    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOKROW 

receives  payment  of  the  tribute  in  rice 
paddy,  which  he  credits  to  the  native  at  two 
reals  in  silver  per  caban.  Then  he  pays  this 
sum  into  the  Eoyal  Treasury  in  money,  and 
sells  the  rice  paddy  for  private  account  at 
the  current  rate  of  six,  eight,  or  more  reals 
in  silver  per  caban,  and  this  simple  opera- 
tion brings  him  200  to  300  per  cent,  profit. ' ' 
One  is  not  surprised  to  hear  that  officials  on 
retiring  from  office  took  with  them,  when 
they  returned  to  Spain,  large  sums,  three  or 
four  times  exceeding  their  total  official 
emoluments. 

Under  such  a  system  of  civic  corruption 
at  the  top,  it  inevitably  followed  that  the 
rottenness  reached  all  the  way  down.  One 
is  irresistibly  reminded  of  our  police  sys- 
tems in  cities,  with  their  political ' '  bosses, ' ' 
by  an  experience  of  the  author  I  have  al- 
ready quoted.  In  1885  he  bought  a  small 
estate  which  had  been  leased  to  a  tenant 
whom  the  purchaser  found  at  the  moment 
in  the  Manila  jail  for  a  violent  assault. 
Three  months  later  the  man  was  at  large, 
and  he  was  soon  after  appointed  governor 
of  his  own  village. 

It  is  not  to  be  supposed,  however,  that 
such  a  state  of  things  existed  without  the 
mechanisms  and  processes  of  the  law  by 
which  it  ought  to  have  been  restrained  or 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES       55 

corrected.  The  difficulty  was  that  the 
courts  and  the  usual  legal  processes  and 
personages  were  as  corruptible  as  the 
higher  officials.  "I  knew,"  says  Foreman,1 
"a  man  in  Negros  Island— a  planter — who 
was  charged  with  homicide.  The  judge  of 
his  Province  acquitted  him,  but  fearing  that 
he  might  be  again  arrested  on  the  same 
charge,  he  came  up  to  Manila  with  me  to 
procure  a  ratification  of  the  sentence  in  the 
Supreme  Court.  The  expenses  of  the  legal 
proceedings  were  so  enormous,  that  at 
length  he  was  compelled  to  fully  mortgage 
his  plantation.  Weeks  passed,  and  he  had 
spent  all  his  money  without  getting  justice, 
so  I  lent  his  notary  40Z.  to  assist  in  bringing 
the  case  to  an  end.  The  planter  returned  to 
Negros  apparently  satisfied  that  he  should 
be  no  further  troubled,  but  later  on,  the 
newly  appointed  judge  in  that  island,  whilst 
prospecting  for  fees  by  turning  up  old 
cases,  unfortunately  came  across  this,  and 
my  planter  acquaintance  was  sentenced  to 
eight  years'  imprisonment."  The  narrator 
of  this  incident  naively  informs  us  that 
' '  the  family  lawyer,  proceeding  on  the  same 
lines,  had  still  a  hope  of  finding  defects  in 
the  sentence  to  reverse  it  in  favour  of  his 
client."  How  could  it  be  otherwise  when, 

i  "The  Philippine  Islands,"  p.  268. 


56    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

a  little  earlier,  we  are  informed  that  if  a 
case  had  been  tried  and  judgment  given 
under  the  civil  code  a  way  was  often  found 
to  convert  it  into  a  criminal  case ;  and  when 
apparently  settled  under  the  criminal  code, 
a  flaw  could  be  discovered  under  the  Laws 
of  the  Indies,  or  the  Siete  Partidas,  or  the 
Koman  law,  or  the  Novisima  Recopilacion, 
or  the  Antiguos  fueros,  decrees,  royal  or- 
ders, Ordenanzas  de  buen  Gobierno,  or 
some  others  by  which  the  case  could  be  re- 
opened? Such  a  state  of  things  throws  an 
interesting  side-light  upon  the  charming 
innocence  of  those  American  commission- 
ers who,  in  the  recent  treaty  of  Paris,  vir- 
tually reenacted  the  above  Philippine  sys- 
tem of  civil  and  ecclesiastical  law.  One  is 
tempted  to  say  that  the  prayer  from  the 
bench,  "May  God  have  mercy  on  your 
soul ! ' '  might  not  only  fitly  follow  a  criminal 
trial,  but  precede  a  civil  one. 

Any  description  of  the  Philippine  situa- 
tion would,  however,  be  gravely  incomplete 
which  omitted  that  other  element  in  it  which 
was  neither  military  nor  civil,  but  ecclesi- 
astical. We  ought  not  to  fail  to  recognize, 
in  reviewing  it,  those  earlier  motives  of 
missionary  zeal  which  found  undoubtedly  a 
welcome  sphere  in  all  the  splendid  range  of 
Spanish  conquests.  The  heathen  peoples  to 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES       67 

whom  the  conquerors  came  were  in  pagan 
darkness,  and  a  Christian  and  Catholic 
monarch  owned  the  obligation  to  impart  to 
them  the  religion  which  was  identified  with 
the  history  of  his  people  and  the  founda- 
tions of  his  throne.  That  the  methods 
which  were  employed  to  this  end  were  not 
always  or  often  those  which  to-day  would 
receive  the  unqualified  sanction  of  the  de- 
scendants of  those  who  invoked  them  is  only 
to  say  that  the  ideas  of  Christian  expansion, 
whether  Latin,  Greek,  or  of  the  Reformed 
communions,  were  not  those  which  intelli- 
gent people  of  any  Christian  fellowship 
would  to-day  approve.  A  religion  of  exter- 
nalism  and  a  propaganda  of  force  went 
hand  in  hand ;  and  that  their  fruits  were  not 
manifest  in  regenerated  characters  or  in  a 
pure  and  righteous  social  order  was  simply 
because  no  seed  was  sown  which  could  have 
produced  such  fruits.  But  the  gravest  as- 
pects of  the  ecclesiastical  history  of  the 
Philippines  appear  when  we  turn  to  look, 
in  the  pages  of  their  own  historians,  for  the 
influence,  whether  of  institutions  or  of  in- 
dividuals, in  bringing  to  pagan  tribes  no- 
bler ideals  and  a  doctrine  or  practice  re- 
sembling even  in  some  remote  degrees  those 
of  the  brotherhood  of  Jesus  Christ.  For 
this  it  ought  distinctly  to  be  said  that  at 


68    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEEOW 

first  the  church  was  only  indirectly  respon- 
sible. The  civil  and  military  authorities 
soon  discovered  that  in  the  Philippine  Isl- 
anders they  had  a  people  extremely  sen- 
sible to  external  impressions,  ignorant, 
credulous,  and  superstitious.  From  the 
awe  with  which  they  witnessed  rites  and 
ceremonies  unfamiliar,  but  dramatically 
impressive,  they  passed  readily  and  swiftly 
to  awe  and  fear  of  those  who  performed 
them,  and  the  civil  ruler  found  himself  in- 
voking ecclesiastical  terrors  because  often 
no  others  proved  to  be  so  effective.  Out 
of  this  it  not  unnaturally  grew  that  the  ec- 
clesiastic came,  in  time,  to  unite  both  sacred 
and  secular  functions,— the  church  has  too 
readily  in  every  age  assumed  them  both,— 
and  the  prelate  and  the  priest  became, 
sooner  or  later,  the  magistrate  and  the 
judge.  In  such  capacities  the  village  pas- 
tor took  on  ultimately  the  character  of  a 
government  agent,  and,  as  such,  it  was 
within  his  discretion  arbitrarily  to  grant  or 
to  refuse  his  official  signature  to  documents 
which  without  it  had  no  value.  Or  he 
could,  as  a  guardian  of  the  public  safety, 
denounce  to  the  authorities  as  a  dangerous 
person  one  whose  presence  in  the  district 
was  inconvenient  to  himself,  and  presently, 
by  order  of  the  governor  of  the  province, 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES       59 

the  obnoxious  person  disappeared— es- 
corted to  prison  or  banished  to  a  distant 
island. 

That  these  things  and  others  like  them 
were  largely  due  to  the  malign  influence  of 
the  so-called  religious  orders — Heaven  save 
the  mark!— has  repeatedly  and  very  re- 
cently been  denied  with  a  coarseness  and 
vulgarity  of  vituperation  to  which  I  need 
not  here  further  refer  than  to  say  that  to 
minds  capable  of  forming  a  dispassionate 
opinion  upon  any  subject  it  was  sufficient 
evidence  of  their  truth.  Other  evidence, 
however,  there  is  in  the  history  of  the  Phil- 
ippines, abundant,  continuous,  and  of  indis- 
putable authority,  most  of  all  to  those  who 
have  ventured  to  challenge  it.  The  Jesuits 
were  expelled  from  the  Philippine  Islands 
in  the  year  1768  by  virtue  of  an  apostolic 
brief  of  Pope  Clement  XIV.1  It  is  quite 
true  that  they  were  permitted  to  return  in 
1852,  but  only  on  condition  that  they  should 
confine  their  labors  to  strictly  educational 
and  missionary  work.  And  these  were  un- 
doubtedly the  least  obnoxious  of  the  orders, 
the  others — the  Austin  Friars,  Recoletos, 
Dominicans,  and  Franciscans — being  iden- 
tified with  incidents  in  the  social  and  do- 

royal  decree  setting  forth  the  execution  of  this 
brief  was  printed  in  Madrid  in  1770  (Foreman). 


60    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

mestic  life  of  the  Philippine  people,  the  cor- 
ruption of  their  households,  and  the  adroit 
sequestration  and  appropriation  of  their 
property,  which  will  continue  to  make  any 
attempt  by  the  government  of  the  United 
States  to  avoid  or  evade  the  question  of 
the  friars  an  utterly  vain  and  futile  one. 
On  the  relations  of  these  orders  to  one  an- 
other an  amusing  side-light  is  thrown  by  an 
incident  in  the  history  of  the  Dominicans, 
by  whom,  in  1778,  the  province  of  Panga- 
sinan  was  spiritually  administered,  while 
that  of  Zambales  was  allotted  to  the  Reco- 
letos.  The  Dominicans  therefore  proposed 
to  the  Recoletos  to  cede  Zambales  to  them, 
* '  because  it  was  repugnant  to  them  to  have 
to  pass  through  Recoletos  territory  in  going 
from  Manila  to  their  own  province."  The 
1  ( Recopilacion  de  las  Leyes  de  Indies" 
shows  that  it  at  length  became  necessary  to 
forbid  these  amiable  brethren  to  have  any 
part  in  civil  government.1 

I  have  thus  rehearsed  the  influences 
which  had  so  much  to  do  with  creating  the 
situation  which  existed  when  the  fleet  of 
Admiral  Dewey  found  its  way  into  Manila 
Bay,  because  only  so  can  one  get  an  intelli- 
gent view  of  a  problem  which  has  in  it  un- 
usual elements  of  delicacy  and  difficulty. 

J  Ley  46,  tit.  14  (Foreman). 


THE  PROBLEM  OF   THE  PHILIPPINES        61 

Those  who  accept  unreservedly  a  policy  of 
colonial  expansion,  concerning  which  I  have 
myself  seen  nothing  in  our  recent  history 
to  change  opinions  formed  long  ago,  are 
fond  of  pointing  to  the  achievements  of 
Anglo-Saxon  colonization  in  other  lands, 
and  of  asking  why  we  may  not  match  them. 
If  there  were  no  other  answer  to  that  ques- 
tion it  might  be  found  in  that  quite  excep- 
tional unlikeness  in  the  Philippine  situation 
to  situations,  such  as  that  in  India,  where 
the  colonizing  power  has  had  to  deal  with  a 
people  that,  whatever  its  tribal  differences, 
is  largely  homogeneous.  But  an  especial 
difficulty  in  the  Philippine  situation,  which 
includes  tribal  differences  running  all  the 
way,  as  in  the  case  of  the  Negritos,  from  the 
extreme  of  barbarism  to  conditions,  as  with 
many  of  the  Tagalos,  of  semi-civilization, 
is  that  you  have  those  most  perplexing  com- 
plications which  arise  out  of  the  superim- 
position  upon  the  native  tribes  of  a  civiliza- 
tion partly  Japanese,1  partly  Chinese,  and 
overpoweringly  Spanish,  whose  influence, 
whatever  it  may  have  been  for  good,  must 
be  owned  by  an  impartial  student  to  have 

1  It  is  not  generally  known,  perhaps,  that  so  late  as  1896 
the  Katipunan,  a  secret  patriotic  society  of  the  Filipinos 
(persistently  misrepresented  as  a  masonic  order),  sent  a 
deputation  to  Japan  to  present  a  petition  to  the  Mikado 
praying  him  to  annex  the  Philippines. 


62    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

been  never  such  as  to  create  in  the  native 
mind  a  faith  in  the  government  as  the 
friend  of  liberty  and  equity,  or  an  affection 
or  respect  for  rulers  as  the  dispensers  of 
justice  or  the  exemplars  of  blameless  living 
or  honest  dealing.  In  a  word,  there  has 
been  nothing  in  the  past  history  of  the  Fili- 
pino to  educate  him  to  value  or  to  imitate 
liigh  ideals  of  official  authority  or  civic, 
social,  or  domestic  self-restraint. 

It  is  not  surprising  that  these  peoples 
should  have  been  impatient  under  a  condi- 
tion of  things  in  which  law  and  religion 
and  their  official  representatives  stood  for 
so  little  that  boded  anything  but  evil  to 
them.  The  revolutionary  movement  repre- 
sented by  Aguinaldo  and  those  associated 
with  him  was  therefore  to  have  been  antici- 
pated, and  had  had,  indeed,  its  repeated 
forerunners.  The  practical  question  was, 
and  is,  What  did  it  amount  to,  what  was  its 
worth?  There  is  no  question  in  connection 
with  the  Philippine  problem  more  impor- 
tant than  this,  nor  any  concerning  which 
the  effort  to  create  an  erroneous  impression 
has  been  more  strenuous  or  more  persistent. 
The  comparisons  between  our  own  strug- 
gle for  independence  and  that  of  the  young 
guerrilla  warrior  have  been  frequent  and 
eloquent.  Their  only  defect  is  that  the 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES       63 

facts  which  warranted  any  such  comparison 
were  so  largely  wanting.     I  say  nothing 
here  of  the  just  doubts  which  any  one  ac- 
quainted with  the  history  of  the  Filipino 
leader  must  needs  entertain,   whether  as 
to  the  integrity  of  his  record  or  the  honesty 
of  his  purpose.    I  maintain  that  it  is  simply, 
an    intolerable    impertinence    to    compare 
him  or  those  who  are  about  him  with  the 
men  who  were  the  leaders  in  our  struggle 
for  freedom  and  who  laid  the  foundations 
of  the  republic.    The  warrant  for  a  struggle 
for  freedom  must  be  found  in  something 
more  than  the  mere  passion  to  be  free  from 
an  irksome  yoke,  or  else  any  desire  to  break 
out  of  wonted  restraints  and  the  chafing 
limitations  of  hated  social  order  becomes 
straightway  a  sacred  aspiration  with  which 
we  are  bound  to  sympathize,  and  in  which 
we  are  bound  to  cooperate.    I  venture  to 
speak  with  some  warmth  on  this  subject, 
because  my  knowledge,  through  correspon- 
dence and  personal  interviews  with  those 
who  have  stood,  not  only  in  the  Philippine 
Islands,  but  in  America,  Japan,  and  China, 
as  the  representatives  and  spokesmen  of 
the  revolutionary  movement  there,  has  ex- 
tended over  nearly  three  years  and  has  in- 
cluded a  considerable  variety  of  individ- 
uals; and  I  am  constrained  to  say  that 


64    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

it  has  only  deepened  my  conviction  that, 
whatever  elements  of  equity  there  may  be 
in  the  Philippine  struggle  for  freedom,  the 
leaders  have  not  yet  appeared  who  could 
be  seriously  considered  as  competent  to  lead 
or  organize  it. 

Under  these  circumstances  the  duty  of 
the  government  of  the  United  States  does 
not  seem  to  be  obscure.  Through  the  blun- 
der of  the  naval  commander  who,  after 
his  splendid  achievement  in  destroying  a 
Spanish  fleet  in  the  harbor  of  Manila,  failed 
to  see  that  his  task  there  was  at  an  end, 
we  have  assumed  another  and  a  much  more 
difficult  one.  We  have  had  no  training  for 
its  discharge;  we  have  a  very  inferior 
mechanism  for  its  accomplishment ;  and  we 
are  cursed  with  political  traditions  which 
make  it  doubly  difficult  to  perform  it  suc- 
cessfully. But  at  this  writing  there  is  no 
honorable  way  out.  To  throw  up  our  task 
now  would  be  a  cruelty  to  those  whom  we 
abandon,  and  a  confession  of  our  impotence 
which  would  disgrace  us  before  the  world. 
The  element  of  time  in  the  whole  melan- 
choly business  is  that  which  has  trans- 
formed essentially  its  aspect.  We  must  go 
on  now,  whether  or  no  we  find  the  task  more 
expensive  in  men  and  means,  and  less 
profitable  commercially,  than  originally  we 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES        65 

expected.  Noblesse  oblige.  A  great  nation 
cannot  abandon  a  weaker  people  which  it 
has,  before  all  men,  adopted  as  its  ward 
without  confessing  that,  great  as  it  claims 
to  be,  it  has  nothing  to  impart,  nothing  to 
sacrifice,  in  order  to  give  freedom  and  good 
government  to  those  who  have  not  forfeited 
all  claim  to  such  gifts  because  they  have 
looked  for  them  in  the  wrong  direction. 

I  would  not  minimize  the  difficulties  or 
the  costliness  of  the  task.  I  have  elsewhere 
than  in  these  pages  l  recognized  our  consid- 
erable inadequacy  for  it.  But  that  inade- 
quacy consists  rather  in  our  instruments 
than  in  the  absence  of  those  informing  prin- 
ciples which  must  forever  determine  the 
value  of  any  instruments,  and  which  are. 
forever  at  the  foundation  of  all  good  gov- 
ernment. The  greatest  glory,  as  a  history 
of  administration,  of  our  Civil  War  was 
that  after  we  had  blundered,  and  had  bred 
swindling  contractors  and  shoddy  manufac- 
turers and  smuggling,  and  incompetent 
generals,  then,  like  some  great  creature 
breasting  the  waves,  we  shook  ourselves 
free  from  them,  and  rose  above  them,  and 
did  the  tasks,  and  fed  and  moved  the 
armies,  and  fought  our  battles,  better  and 

1  See  an  address  before  the  Church  Congress, 
6  October,  1899. 


66    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEROW 

better.  And,  best  of  all,  we  searched  for 
and  found  the  men,  and  lifted  them  from 
their  obscurity,— Lincoln,  Stanton,  Grant, 
and  their  peers  and  successors,— who  did 
the  thinking  and  planned  the  marching, 
and  fed  and  moved  the  armies  that  won 
through  to  victory.  I  am  not  one  of  those 
who  believe  that  the  people  of  the  United 
States  have  lost  the  capacity  to  repeat  such 
achievements.  There  are  many  who  will 
never  cease  to  regret  our  original  blunder 
in  the  Philippine  Islands.  But  they  are  not 
so  despairing  of  their  country  as  to  believe 
that  she  is  so  far  gone  from  original  right- 
eousness that  she  has  in  her  no  virtue  left 
with  which  to  educate  those  distant  islands 
for  freedom;  and  meanwhile  it  is  just  as 
well  to  remember  that  her  rulers  have  never 
intimated  that  this  government  has  any 
other  purpose  in  regard  to  them. 

But  we  shall  gravely  blunder  if  we  mini- 
mize or  evade  any  one  of  the  difficult  tasks 
which  are  before  us.  There  are  influences 
that  will  tempt  the  leaders  of  political  par- 
ties to  do  this,  which  it  would  be  the  crud- 
est folly  to  ignore.  If  we  are  ever  to  win 
the  confidence  and  mold  the  characters  of 
these  island  peoples  we  must  recognize  the 
injustices  from  which  too  long  they  have 
suffered,  and  set  about  to  right  them.  We 


THE   PROBLEM  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES       67 

must  not  with  one  hand  proffer  them  free- 
dom— freedom  of  thought,  freedom  of 
speech,  freedom  of  worship— and  take  it 
back  with  the  other.  And  we  must  there- 
fore courageously  face  such  questions  as, 
for  example,  What  has  the  government  of 
the  United  States  to  say  to  a  pronuncia- 
mento  like  this! — 

"You  must  reject  and  condemn  the  ma- 
sonic sect,  so  frequently  rejected  and  con- 
demned by  the  supreme  pontiffs. 

"You  must  also  reject  and  condemn  lib- 
erty of  worship,  liberty  of  the  press,  liberty 
of  thought,  and  the  other  liberties  of  perdi- 
tion, condemned  and  rejected  by  the  pon- 
tiff. 

"You  must  also  reject  and  condemn  lib- 
eralism and  also  modern  progress  and  civ- 
ilization, as  being  false  progress  and  false 
civilization. 

"You  must  utterly  abominate  civil  mar- 
riage and  regard  it  as  pure  concubinage. 

"You  must  also  condemn  and  reject  the 
interference  of  the  civil  authorities  in  any 
ecclesiastical  affairs,  so  much  in  vogue 
nowadays. ' ' 

I  take  these  instructions  from  a  lately 
published  pamphlet  in  Manila.  This  pam- 
phlet was  issued  without  duly  expressed 
church  authority,  until  the  organ  of  the 


68    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

Roman  Catholic  Church  in  Manila,  a  Span- 
ish newspaper  called  the  "Liberastus," 
admitted  the  fact  that  the  Jesuits  had  pub- 
lished it.1 

There  is  not  the  slightest  occasion  to  in- 
voke theological  or  ecclesiastical  rancors  in 
connection  with  questions  raised  by  such  a 
publication  as  this.  But  it  should  also  be 
said  that  there  is  as  little  for  being  deterred 
by  any  fulminations  of  that  sort  of  thunder, 
now  happily  reduced  to  the  dimensions  and 
substance  of  the  sheet-tin  rattled  for  a  simi- 
lar purpose  behind  the  scenic  stage,  from 
considering  calmly  and  dispassionately 
what  it  bodes  to  the  rights  and  liberties  of 
those  whom  it  seeks  to  terrorize,  or  to  the 
free  institutions  which  it  will  be  our  sacred 
duty  as  well  as  our  privilege  to  plant  among 
them.  Our  tasks,  at  the  best,  in  the  Philip- 
pines are  not  easy  ones.  It  will  be  neces- 
sary, at  the  outset,  to  have  it  definitely  un- 
derstood that  they  are  not  to  be  obstructed 
by  influences  and  societies  of  whose  enor- 
mous power  for  mischief  and  corruptness 
the  history  of  the  Philippine  Islands  is  the 
melancholy  and  tragic  record. 

As  to  what  American  rule  has  already 
achieved  in  our  new  possessions,  I  am  glad 
to  affirm  here  what  correspondence  extend- 

1  New  York  "Evening  Post,"  May  16,  1900. 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES        69 

ing  over  two  years,  the  testimony  of  respon- 
sible and  impartial  witnesses  of  all  classes, 
and  personal  observation  have  led  me  to  be- 
lieve in  regard  to  our  army  and  our  civil 
servants  in  the  Philippine  Islands.  That 
there  have  been  no  unworthy  or  ill-con- 
ducted individuals  among  them  would  be 
to  demand  that  the  standard  of  conduct,  for 
example,  in  Manila  should  be  higher  than 
it  is  in  Washington  or  Boston.  I  do  not  be- 
lieve that  it  is,  but  I  do  believe  that  it  is 
quite  as  high.  The  soldiers  do  not  love 
their  work  in  the  Philippines,— I  should  not, 
if  I  had  to  do  it,— but  they  do  it,  as  I  more 
than  once  saw,  so  as  to  earn  the  evident  con- 
fidence of  the  communities  among  which 
they  are  stationed,  and  to  give  proof  to 
these  of  the  spirit  and  purpose  of  our  pres- 
ence in  the  Philippines.  Time  alone  can 
demonstrate  how  far  we  may  be  able  to  per- 
suade a  fickle,  restless,  impulsive,  unreason- 
ing people,  embittered  by  many  wrongs 
received  at  the  hands  of  those  we  have  ex- 
pelled, or  ought  to  expel,  to  trust  us,  to 
learn  from  us,  and  under  our  patient  tute- 
lage to  grow  into  the  stature  of  competent 
citizens  in  a  self-governing  state. 


m 

IMPRESSIONS  OF  JAPAN 


Ill 

IMPRESSIONS  OF  JAPAN 

MY  traveling  companion  in  Japan  was  a 
gentleman  of  various  culture  and  of 
artistic  tastes.  These  latter  found  in  Japa- 
nese architecture  and  decorative  drawing 
certain  resemblances  to  American  art  and 
the  recent  work  of  well-known  American 
artists  which,  to  my  cruder  intelligence  and 
more  imperfect  culture,  were  not  discerni- 
ble, and  which  led  him  to  active  investiga- 
tions for  the  confirmation  of  his  theories. 
They  took  us,  one  morning,  into  a  curio- 
dealer's  establishment,  and  soon  immersed 
my  friend  in  a  huge  pile  of  portfolios,  the 
contents  of  which  I  was  soon  constrained 
to  confess  were  to  me  neither  interesting 
nor  even  intelligible.  Under  these  circum- 
stances, taking  advantage  of  my  compan- 
ion's absorption  in  a  hideous  drawing  of 
a  Japanese  interior,  which  to  my  ignorant 
scrutiny  violated  every  law  of  perspective 
and  every  principle  of  the  harmony  of  col- 

73 


74    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

ors,  I  quietly  slipped  out  of  the  shop,  and 
after  a  few  steps  found  myself  in  one  of 
the  greater  highways  through  which  to-day 
throbs  the  various  life  of  the  capital  of 
modern    Japan.      There    was    local    color 
enough  there,  though  a  good  deal  of  it  was 
not  Japanese ;  and  presently  I  found  myself 
before  a  shop-window  not  unlike  such  a  one 
as  might  be  found  in  our  own  New  York 
Third  or  Eighth  Avenue— the  window  of  a 
place  primarily  for  the  sale  of  newspapers 
and  periodicals,  but  incidentally  for  almost 
anything  and  everything  else.    Here,  con- 
spicuously displayed  among  other  prints 
and  pictures,  was  suspended  a  huge  broad- 
side,  such  as   comes  sometimes  with   the 
London  "Graphic"  or  "Illustrated  News," 
representing  the  assembled  sovereigns  and 
rulers  of  the  world.    Their  grouping  had  in 
it  a  large  suggestion,  and  furnished  to  the 
student  of  political  history  a  very  useful 
lesson.    In  the  center  of  this  august  group 
was  seated  the   Emperor  of  Japan,   and 
gathered  about  him  in  respectful  attitudes 
were   kings    and    queens    and    presidents, 
among  whom  was  our  own  chief  magistrate, 
placed  in  what  apparently,   according  to 
Japanese  art,  was  a  position  of  appropriate 
obscurity  on  the  extreme  left  of  the  em- 
peror, while  standing  behind  the  imperial 


IMPEESSIONS  OF  JAPAN  75 

chair  in  which  the  Mikado  was  seated  (this 
struck  me,  I  confess,  as  curiously  contra- 
vening the  Japanese  traditions  of  good 
manners)  was  the  late  venerable  and  ven- 
erated Queen  of  Great  Britain  and  Ireland 
and  Empress  of  India,  whose  years  and  un- 
exampled reign,  if  not  her  sex,  would  seem 
to  have  entitled  her  to  one  of  the  chairs  in 
which,  as  I  observed,  the  young  German 
Emperor  and  our  own  President  were  rep- 
resented as  lounging. 

But  the  chief  value  of  the  picture  lay  in 
the  help  which  it  gave  to  the  traveler  in 
recovering  his  political  perspective.  If  a 
modern  publisher  should  make  a  lithograph 
of  the  rulers  of  the  world  for  American 
consumption,  I  presume  he  would  put  our 
own  President  in  the  center,  just  as  in  the 
Transvaal  a  Boer  publisher  getting  out  any- 
thing of  the  sort  would  have  put  Oom  Paul 
there.  The  thing,  in  other  words,  for  the 
traveler  to  learn  from  such  an  incident  is 
that  Japan— only  like  the  rest  of  the  world, 
after  all,  in  that— takes  itself  quite  seri- 
ously. We  Americans,  on  the  contrary,  do 
not,  as  a  rule,  take  Japan  at  all  seriously. 
The  thing  that  irritated  me  in  my  country- 
men, and  quite  as  often  in  other  foreigners, 
wherever  I  met  them  in  Japan,  and  often, 
too,  in  what  I  read  in  the  books  about  Ja- 


76    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOKEOW 

pan,  was  that  so  many  people  thought  it 
necessary  to  take  everything  that  they  saw 
or  heard  there  as  a  part  of  a  huge  opera 
bouffe.  It  was  my  good  fortune  when  in 
Tokio,  through  the  courtesy  of  Colonel 
Buck,  our  most  able  and  capable  minister 
plenipotentiary  to  Japan,  to  have  the  rare 
privilege  of  witnessing  the  opening  of  the 
Japanese  Parliament  by  the  emperor  in 
propria  persona.  My  companion  and  I 
were,  with  the  exception  of  the  diplomatic 
corps,  the  only  foreigners  present;  and  I 
confess  I  thought  the  occasion  one  of  most 
impressive  dignity  and  interest,  albeit 'the 
costumes  both  of  the  nobles  and  of  the  mem- 
bers of  the  House  of  Commons  were  Euro- 
pean instead  of  those  of  the  charming  out- 
lines and  coloring  usually  worn  by  persons 
of  distinction  in  Japan.  Speaking,  how- 
ever, of  the  occasion  to  a  member  of  a  for- 
eign legation,  a  little  later,  his  only  obser- 
vation was,  "Did  you  ever  see  such  a  droll 
collection  of  old  hats  I "  I  could  not  refrain 
from  replying  that,  if  the  hats  were  old,  the 
ideas  inside  of  them,  as  their  wearers 
swarmed  in  to  their  places,  were  both  new 
and  already  fermenting;  and  I  should  be 
tempted  to  say  that  the  man  or  nation  that 
does  not  take  Japan  seridusly  is  on  the  way 
to  a  considerable  surprise. 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  JAPAN  77 

And  yet  the  elements  of  lightness  and 
gaiety,  along  with  self-complacency,  if  not 
large  conceit,  of  which  I  have  spoken,  are 
undoubtedly  distinctive  of  Japanese  char- 
acter. As  to  the  former, — that  note  of  vi- 
vacity, cheerfulness,  and  even  playfulness 
which  the  foreigner  so  often  remarks, — its 
tokens  perpetually  recur.  The  conditions 
of  life  in  Japan,  for  the  great  majority  of 
its  forty  millions  of  people,  are  inevitably 
narrow  and  hard.  It  has  not  been,  until 
lately,  a  nation  of  various  resources  or  of 
commercial  productiveness.  The  great  ma- 
jority of  its  people  must  subsist  directly 
upon  the  soil,  and  from  this  they  get  little 
more  than  the  simplest  food  and  the  scanti- 
est raiment.  And  yet  the  stranger  in  going 
to  and  fro  among  them  is  struck  with  their 
smiling  faces  and  the  merry  laughter  that 
he  so  often  hears,  amid  surroundings  and  in 
connection'  with  tasks  and  burdens  which, 
it  would  seem,  would  press  all  joy  out  of 
life.  Added  to  this,  there  is  a  disposition 
to  adorn  the  simplest  things  and  to  enrich 
the  homeliest  duties  with  a  certain  quaint 
prettiness  which  gives  to  them  an  almost 
attractive  aspect.  It  is  said  that  the  art 
of  making  and  pouring  out  tea,  in  the  life 
of  a  young  Japanese  girl,  is  encompassed 
with  so  much  variety  and  even  intricacy 


78    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORKOW 

of  ceremony  that  it  takes  two  years  prop- 
erly to  acquire  and  practise  it. 

Such  a  fact  is  somehow  symbolic  of  much 
more.  The  humblest  tasks  have  in  the 
doing  of  them  a  rhythmic  usage,  and  the 
relation  of  this  to  certain  kinds  of  work 
most  remote,  one  would  say,  to  anything 
like  artistic  form  was  shown  in  a  very  curi- 
ous way  by  a  controversy  which  was  going 
on  in  certain  Japanese  newspapers  while  I 
was  in  Japan.  A  correspondent  had  written 
to  one  of  them  to  complain  of  the  condition 
of  the  railway  between  Yokohama  and  To- 
kio,  and  was  answered  by  some  one  who 
wrote  in  demurrer  of  his  criticisms,  evi- 
dently under  official  inspiration.  Mean- 
time, however,  a  foreigner  had  taken  a 
hand  in  the  discussion,  and  touched,  as  it 
would  seem,  the  nerve  of  the  whole  busi- 
ness. He  had  observed,  he  said,  the  Japa- 
nese track-layers  at  work,  and  had  watched 
their  methods  when  they  were  repairing  the 
road-bed  of  the  railway  in  question.  The 
roughness  of  the  road,  with  the  consequent 
jumping  or  jolting  (5f  the  railway-carriages, 
was  owing,  as  he  pointed  out,  to  the  ine- 
qualities of  the  road-bed,  and  to  the  loosen- 
ing of  the  ties  or  timbers  which  rested  upon 
it.  This,  he  explained,  could  be  remedied 
only  by  redistributing  the  earth  upon  which 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  JAPAN  79 

the  ties  rested,  and,  above  all,  by  careful 
and  intelligent  repacking  of  the  soil  and 
stones  beneath  and  around  the  ties;  and 
then  he  added  that  when  Japanese  work- 
men undertook  this  task  they  worked  in 
groups  of  three  or  four,  all  of  whom  used 
their  picks  in  unison  and  struck  their  blows 
in  obedience  to  the  sound  of  some  rhythmic 
measure.  But  such  a  method,  as  he  showed 
plainly  enough,  was  wholly  unsuited  to  such 
an  end.  The  loosening,  gathering,  dislodg- 
ing, replacing,  and  repacking  of  stones  and 
soil  under  a  railway-tie  could  not  be  done 
otherwise  than  as  it  was  done  by  the  indi- 
vidual workman  using  his  tool  and  direct- 
ing his  work  quite  independently  of  any 
other  tool  or  hand,  just  as  from  moment  to 
moment  the  situation  revealed  itself  and  the 
exigency  demanded.  There  must  be  the 
intelligent  observation  first,  and  then  the 
independent  action  of  the  independent  and 
individual  mind  and  hand.  Undoubtedly 
one  saw  in  the  Japanese  method,  in  this 
particular  case,  the  survival,  and  the  appli- 
cation under  conditions  to  which  they  were 
utterly  inappropriate,  of  those  older  meth- 
ods of  labor  in  which  the  laborer  worked 
as  a  machine,  chained  together  with  other 
laborers  in  a  group  or  gang,  in  which  no 
man  thought  for  himself,  but  in  which  each 


80    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEROW 

man  repeated  mechanically  the  movement 
and  gesture  of  his  neighbor,  softening  it,  as 
so  often  one  hears  among  Oriental  peoples, 
with  some  monotonous  but  rhythmical 
chant,  which  was  droned  or  sung  as  uncon- 
sciously as  all  the  rest.  At  such  a  point  the 
mind  inevitably  reached  out  to  recognize 
the  difference  between  such  work,  with  all 
its  inevitable  defects  and  limitations,  and 
that  other  freer  labor  where  the  worker 
wrought  by  himself,  thought  for  himself, 
and  aimed  the  blow,  not  as  any  fixed  and 
formally  recurring  rhythm  demanded,  but 
as  the  free  judgment  and  the  free  hand  en- 
joined and  directed. 

Yet  one  could  not  but  see,  now  and  then, 
how  effective  in  its  way  was  the  older 
usage ;  and  behind  it  there  shone  often  the 
tokens  of  an  exceptional  power.  If  I  were 
asked  to  say,  of  all  that  I  saw  in  Japan, 
what  that  is  that  lives  most  vividly  in  my 
memory,  I  should  probably  shock  my  artis- 
tic reader  by  saying  that  it  was  the  loading 
of  a  steamship  at  Nagasaki  with  coal.  The 
huge  vessel,  the  Empress  of  Japan,  was  one 
morning,  soon  after  its  arrival  at  Nagasaki, 
suddenly  festooned— I  can  use  no  other 
word— from  stem  to  stern  on  each  side  with 
a  series  of  hanging  platforms,  the  broadest 
nearest  the  base  and  diminishing  as  they 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  JAPAN  81 

rose,  strung  together  by  ropes,  and  ascend- 
ing from  the  sampans,  or  huge  boats  in 
which  the  coal  had  been  brought  alongside 
the  steamer,  until  the  highest  and  narrow- 
est platform  was  just  below  the  particular 
port-hole  through  which  it  was  received 
into  the  ship.  There  were,  in  each  case,  all 
along  the  sides  of  the  ship,  some  four  or  five 
of  these  platforms,  one  above  another,  on 
each  of  which  stood  a  young  girl.  On  board 
the  sampans  men  were  busy  filling  a  long 
line  of  baskets  holding,  I  should  think,  each 
about  two  buckets  of  coal,  and  these  were 
passed  up  from  the  sampans  in  a  continu- 
ous and  unbroken  line  until  they  reached 
their  destination,  each  young  girl,  as  she 
stood  on  her  particular  platform,  passing, 
or  rather  almost  throwing,  these  huge  bas- 
ketfuls  of  coal  to  the  girl  above  her,  and 
she  again  to  her  mate  above  her,  and  so  on 
to  the  end.  The  rapidity,  skill,  and,  above 
all,  the  rhythmic  precision  with  which,  for 
hours,  this  really  tremendous  task  was  per- 
formed was  an  achievement  which  might 
well  fill  an  American  athlete  with  envy  and 
dismay.  As  I  moved  to  and  fro  on  the  deck 
above  them,  watching  this  unique  scene,  I 
took  out  my  watch  to  time  these  girls,  and 
again  and  again  I  counted  sixty-nine  bas- 
kets—they never  fell  below  sixty— passed 


82    THE  EAST  OP  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEKOW 

on  board  in  this  way  in  a  single  minute. 
Think  of  it  for  a  moment.  The  task— I 
ought  rather  to  call  it  an  art,  so  neatly,  sim- 
ply, and  gracefully  was  it  done— was  this : 
the  young  girl  stooped  to  her  companion 
below  her,  seized  from  her  uplifted  hands 
a  huge  basket  of  coal,  and  then,  shooting 
her  lithe  arms  upward,  tossed  it  laughingly 
to  the  girl  above  her  in  the  ever-ascending 
chain.  And  all  the  while  there  was  heard, 
as  one  passed  along  from  one  to  another  of 
these  chains  of  living  elevators,  a  clear, 
rhythmical  sound,  which  I  supposed  at  first 
to  have  been  produced  by  some  bystander 
striking  the  metal  string  of  something  like 
a  mandolin,  but  which  I  discovered,  after 
a  little,  was  a  series  of  notes  produced  by 
the  lips  of  these  young  coal-heavers  them- 
selves—distinct, precise,  melodious,  and 
stimulating.  And  at  this  task  these  girls 
continued,  uninterruptedly  and  blithely, 
from  ten  o'clock  in  the  morning  until  four 
o'clock  in  the  afternoon,  putting  on  board 
in  that  time,  I  was  told,  more  than  one  thou- 
sand tons  of  coal.  I  am  quite  free  to  say 
that  I  do  not  believe  that  there  is  another 
body  of  work-folk  in  the  world  who  could 
have  performed  the  same  task  in  the  same 
time  and  with  the  same*  ease. 
And  what  does  it  mean?  For  that  is  the 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  JAPAN  83 

point  of  this  incident,  and  of  all  that  thus 
far  I  have  said.  It  means  that  in  one  aspect 
of  them,  at  any  rate,  the  Japanese  are  not 
what  most  of  us  have  been  wont  to  account 
them — a  feeble  folk.  Again  and  again,  dur- 
ing my  visit  to  Japan,  I  encountered  certain 
of  my  own  countrymen  and  others  who  have 
been  for  a  shorter  or  longer  time  resident 
among  them,  from  whom  I  heard  more  or 
less  amusing  illustrations  of  the  blunders 
which  Japan  has  made  in  what  many  ac- 
count its  overhasty  adoption  of  Western 
ways.  I  was  told,  for  instance,  that  so  in- 
flamed was  Japan  with  a  sense  of  its  suc- 
cesses as  a  sea-power  that,  after  its  late  war 
with  China,  and  after  it  had  received  from 
the  latter  the  war  indemnity  due  to  it,  it 
had  promptly  proceeded  to  invest  the  whole 
sum  in  the  building  or  buying  of  new  ships, 
leaving  no  provision  whatever  for  the  costly 
maintenance  of  these  ships,  each  of  which, 
if  as  large  as  our  own  Olympia  (and  many 
of  them  are),  could  be  kept  in  commission 
and  ready  for  active  service  only  at  an  ex- 
pense of  about  a  thousand  dollars  a  day. 
Now,  undoubtedly,  this  was  very  poor 
financiering — unless  the  government  was 
satisfied  that  in  some  other  way  than  by 
economizing  the  Chinese  indemnity  fund 
it  could  provide  for  manning  and  running 


84    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

these  ships.  But  surely  the  hypothesis  is  at 
least  admissible  that  they  might  be  able  to 
do  so.  It  is  undoubtedly  true  that  in  con- 
nection with  its  transformation  during  the 
last  quarter  of  a  century  Japan  has  been 
spending  too  much  money;  but  I  appre- 
hend that  already  her  own  shrewd  finan- 
ciers have  found  this  out,  and  that  measures 
will  be  devised  to  meet  the  emergency. 

Meantime  the  significant  thing  is  that, 
whatever  this  new  empire  arising  out  of 
the  old  has  done,  she  has  done  well.  There 
may  have  been  too  much  slavish  imitation 
of  Western  methods  at  first,  and  the  effort 
too  rapidly  to  adjust  these  to  an  Oriental 
people  may,  in  some  instances,  have  re- 
sulted in  grotesque  failure.  But  the.  Japa- 
nese are  a  people  quick  to  learn,  and  no 
national  or  local  vanity  has  prevented  them 
from  recognizing  and  correcting  their  own 
blunders.  On  the  other  hand,  their  suc- 
cesses have  been  too  marked  and  note- 
worthy to  be  belittled  or  ignored.  Again 
and  again  while  in  the  national  capital 
I  saw  regiments  of  soldiers  marching 
through  the  streets,  turned  out  in  all  re- 
spects with  remarkable  excellence,  and  car- 
rying themselves  after  a  fashion,  and  re- 
flecting a  precision  and  efficiency  of  drill, 
worthy  of  any  army  in  any  land.  If  in  the 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  JAPAN  85 

future  history  of  the  far  East  there  is  fight- 
ing to  be  done,  I  venture  to  predict  that  the 
army  as  well  as  the  navy  of  Japan  will  give 
a  good  account  of  itself. 

And  what  are  the  chances?  It  has  been 
said  that  Japan  has  been  made  drunk  with 
its  successes  in  China,  and  that  if,  as  is 
likely,  it  should  seek  to  force  another  issue 
with  China,  that  huge  empire,  roused  at 
last,  and  with  its  four  hundred  millions  of 
people  to  draw  from,  would  wipe  it  out. 

But  is  it  likely  ?  So  far  from  its  being  so, 
there  are,  I  apprehend,  other  possibilities 
of  a  far  more  portentous  character  of 
which  as  yet  foreign  statesmen  have  taken 
but  little  account.  In  a  letter  l  written  not 
long  ago  from  Tokio  I  find  these  words : 

We  who  live  in  Japan  and  have  many  opportu- 
nities of  ascertaining  the  views  held  by  publi- 
cists about  the  Chinese  problem  believe  that  we 
are  in  a  position  to  speak  with  some  confidence. 
"What  we  see  before  everything  is  that  the  states- 
men of  the  country  do  not  credit  the  possibility 
of  the  Middle  Kingdom's  [China's]  complete 
disintegration.  They  think  that  its  territorial 
dimensions  may  be  reduced,  but  they  think  also 
that  there  must  always  remain  a  solid  residuum, 
guaranteed  from  disruption  by  the  homoge- 
neity of  the  race,  by  its  vast  resources,  and  by 

1  In  the  Hongkong  "  Telegraph,"  December  17,  1899. 


86    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORKOW 

its  long  history  of  autonomy.  Japan  under- 
stands that  it  is  a  matter  of  life  and  death  to  her 
nascent  industries  to  prevent  any  large  encroach- 
ments upon  Chinese  dominions  by  powers  which 
employ  protective  tariffs  to  close  their  markets. 
She  does  not  want  the  irreducible  minimum  of 
the  Chinese  empire  for  her  commercial  vis-a-vis. 
Then  comes  the  question,  To  what  lengths  is  she 
prepared  to  go,  and  what  methods  does  she  think 
feasible,  for  the  conservation  of  the  Middle  King- 
dom ?  Here  also  there  is  a  notable  consensus  of 
opinion  among  her  leading  politicians.  They 
think  that  what  China  needs  before  everything 
else  at  present  is  a  strong  army  and  a  strong 
navy,  the  weapons  for  self-defense.  She  already 
possesses  materials  for  an  army;  they  require 
only  to  be  molded  into  shape.  Japan  is  best 
fitted  to  undertake  that  task. 

The  letter  then  goes  on  to  deal  with  the 
question  of  a  navy  for  China,  and  con- 
cludes : 

These  are  the  practical  questions  that  press 
for  immediate  settlement,  according  to  the  view 
of  Japanese  publicists.  The  questions  of  finance 
and  general  reform  would  be  national  corollaries 
which  Japan  does  not  seem  to  consider  incapable 
of  solution. 

This  is  a  significant  utterance,  and  its 
significance  is  increased  by  the  fact  that  it 


IMPRESSIONS  OP  JAPAN  87 

appears  in  a  Chinese,  not  a  Japanese,  jour- 
nal, and  that  its  suggestions  are  preceded 
by  the  statement: 

The  Chinese  commissioners  Lin  and  Ching 
have  now  left  Tokio.  Ostensibly  their  journey 
to  Japan  had  a  purely  commercial  object;  they 
were  instructed  to  make  a  careful  investigation 
of  the  trading  and  manufacturing  methods  that 
Japan  is  following  with  success.  But  in  reality 
their  main  purpose  was  to  ascertain  the  possi- 
bilities of  an  alliance  between  the  two  Oriental 
empires. 

A  very  little  reflection  will  enable  one  to 
see  the  enormous  possibilities  that  lurk  in 
language  such  as  this.  Just  now  the  West- 
ern world  is  saying  to  itself:  "At  last  the 
huge  Chinese  empire  is  on  the  eve  of  disin- 
tegration. The  great  wall  is  broken  down. 
The  haughty  seclusion  has  been  invaded. 
There  is  the  carcass,  and  there  already  the 
Western  eagles  are  gathered  together- 
Russia,  England,  Germany,  France,  with 
our  own  national  bird  hovering  near  at 
hand.  It  will  not  be  a  great  while  before 
the  attending  physicians,  to  change  the 
figure,  will  diagnose  the  disease  as  requir- 
ing vivisection,  and  will  divide  the  remains 
between  them."  It  does  not  seem  to  have 
occurred  to  anybody  that  China  herself  may 


88    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

wish  to  have  a  voice  in  the  matter,  or  if  it 
does,  we  are  just  now  being  told  that  she  is 
an  empire  made  up  of  such  heterogeneous 
and  mutually  indifferent  principalities  that 
there  is  no  remotest  prospect  of  binding 
them  together  in  any  common  effort  for 
preserving  the  national  autonomy.  But 
those  who  say  so— in  America,  at  any  rate 
—forget  their  own  very  recent  history,  and 
how  our  States,  east  and  west,  though  di- 
vided by  a  distance  of  three  thousand  miles, 
were  bound  together,  despite  their  diverse 
interests  and.  traditions,  in  one  splendid 
and  heroic  struggle  for  the  life  of  the  Re- 
public. And  if  it  should  be  asked,  "What 
evidence  is  there  that  there  exists  anywhere 
in  China  to-day  any  such  national  sentiment 
as  our  own  Civil  War  disclosed?"  I  think 
that  question  is  sufficiently  answered  by  the 
following  extract  which  I  take  from  a  lead- 
ing Chinese  journal  published  within  the 
last  few  months: 

Foreigners  have  for  many  years  united  them- 
selves, and  have  been  laying  their  plans  with 
regard  to  China.  Originally  they  availed  them- 
selves of  the  plea  of  the  mutual  advantages  aris- 
ing out  of  commerce  to  induce  China  to  open 
treaty  ports  at  which  they  could  trade.  Next, 
under  pretext  of  certain  losses,  in  order  to  en- 
rich themselves,  they  compelled  China  to  pay 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  JAPAN  89 

certain  indemnities.  To-day  they  are  mooting 
the  questions  of  railways  and  mines,  and  using 
them  as  a  pretext  to  get  our  country  from  us. 
.  .  .  In  the  present  dispute  between  Russia 
and  England  ruin  for  China  lurks.  In  reality, 
it  is  only  a  quarrel  about  the  partition  of  China. 
Indeed,  the  surrounding  circumstances  are  con- 
verging to  this  partition.  Foreigners  are  ever 
scheming  for  this.  The  signs  of  this  impend- 
ing calamity  are  all  too  apparent  within  our 
own  borders.  ...  If,  then,  China  is  to  re- 
gain her  original  power,  she  must  arouse  herself 
and  amend  her  ways. 

Does  it  need  to  be  pointed  out  that  be- 
tween language  such  as  this,  translated 
from  a  native  Chinese  journal,  and  the 
visit  of  Chinese  envoys  to  the  capital  of 
Japan,  with  the  account  of  which  I  have 
prefaced  it,  there  is  likely  to  be  a  close  con- 
nection? It  would  seem  from  it,  at  least, 
that  that  large  apathy  with  which  we  have 
been  wont  to  credit  China  is  no  longer  a 
characteristic  of  the  situation.  It  would 
seem  as  if  this  vast  empire  were  at  last 
awakening  and  arousing  herself— nay, 
more:  that  for  the  first  time  in  her  history 
she  is  recognizing  her  deficiencies,  and 
reaching  out  for  help  and  guidance  from 
a  powerful  neighbor  in  correcting  them. 
Supposing,  now,  that  she  gets  from  Japan 


90    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEEOW 

that  help  and  guidance,  we  may  be  sure  that 
Japan  will  be  clever  enough  to  make  her 
pay  for  it.  Indeed,  the  article  which  I  have 
just  been  quoting  goes  on,  at  the  close,  to 
say: 

In  regard  to  Japan,  the  Japanese  secretly  de- 
manded Amoy,  and,  further,  they  have  secretly 
laid  plans  to  usurp  authority  over  the  whole 
province  of  Fu-kien.  Is  not  this  proof  enough 
that  Japan  also  seeks  to  have  her  "sphere  of  in- 
fluence" in  China? 

This  indicates  clearly  enough  that  China 
recognizes  the  thirst  for  empire  which 
burns  in  the  breast  of  her  neighbor.  But  it 
does  not  lessen  the  significance  of  words  in 
which,  in  this  same  article,  referring  to 
Japan,  this  Chinese  correspondent  says: 

It  must  be  remembered  that  Japan  is  a  coun- 
try whose  inhabitants  are  our  brothers.  We  and 
they  are  companions  who  ride  in  the  same  car- 
riage. 

Precisely ;  and  when  once  the  Chinese  peo- 
ple as  a  whole  grasp  this  fact,  and  when 
they  consent,  as  they  have  now  so  lately 
indicated  their  readiness  to  consent,  to 
learn  the  arts  of  war  on  sea  and  land  from 
their  clever  and  resourceful  and  most  am- 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  JAPAN  91 

bitious  neighbor,  then  let  the  West,  in  our 
homely  but  expressive  phrase,  clear  the 
track  for  the  inevitable  changes  that  are 
destined  to  come  to  pass. 

It  is  this  view  of  Japan  that  I  confess 
to-day  most  of  all  interests  me,  and  that  I 
think  must  interest  any  student  of  history, 
ancient  or  modern.  There  is  something 
fascinating  in  this  picture  of  an  ancient 
people,  nobody  knows  quite  how  old  or, 
with  certainty,  whence  derived,  awakening 
at  last  out  of  the  slumber  of  its  antiquated 
puerilities  and  superstitions,  rousing  itself 
from  the  paralysis  of  its  ignorance  and  in- 
sularity, reaching  forth  to  our  Western  life, 
its  art,  its  letters,  its  science,  its  mechanical 
ingenuities,  seizing  their  significance  in  its 
relations  to  the  upbuilding  of  our  Western 
civilizations  with  a  marvelous  rapidity,  and 
then  transferring  them,  with  a  rapidity 
scarcely  less  marvelous,  to  its  own  soil  and 
its  own  life. 

"Alas,"  cries  the  artistic  traveler,  "how 
horrid  to  have  all  this  Japanese  charm  and 
color  despoiled  by  the  introduction  of  our 
hideous  American  modernisms,  noisy,  fe- 
verish, and  mechanical!"  I  think  the  ap- 
prehension is  unnecessary.  On  the  after- 
noon of  the  day  on  which  occurred  that 
opening  of  the  Japanese  Parliament  to 


92    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

which  I  have  already  referred,  I  spent  an 
hour  with  a  Japanese  statesman  of  great 
distinction,  to  whom  I  ventured  to  convey 
my  sense  of  the  dignity  of  the  function  of 
the  morning,  adding,  however,  the  expres- 
sion of  my  hope  that  the  prevalence  of 
European  costumes,  uniforms,  evening 
dress-suits,  and  the  like,  which  distin- 
guished it,  was  not  an  indication  of  a  fash- 
ion which  was  to  prevail  in  Japan,  where 
the  national  dress  of  both  sexes  is  so  much 
more  graceful  and  beautiful  than  our  own. 
"Oh,  no,"  he  laughingly  replied,  "I  don't 
think  it  will.  The  emperor,  as  you  saw, 
wore  the  dress  of  a  European  general ;  but 
you  may  be  sure  that  as  soon  as  he  got  back 
to  the  imperial  palace  he  took  it  off  as 
promptly  as  possible." 

And  in  this  there  is  a  suggestion  of  what 
will  continue  to  come  to  pass  in  Japan.  At 
first  it  was  natural  enough  that  a  people 
impressed  with  the  value  of  those  Western 
forces  in  which  it  had  been  so  long  and  so 
conspicuously  deficient  should,  in  the  effort 
to  appropriate  them,  appropriate  much  that 
was  accidental  rather  than  essential,  and  in 
many  instances  for  the  moment  mistake  the 
relative  value  of  the  two.  But  all  this  will 
right  itself  in  time— indeed,  has  already 
begun  to  do  so.  ' '  Our  men  will  be  likely  to 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  JAPAN  93 

adopt  your  dress,  for  it  is  a  better  working- 
dress  than  their  own ;  but  our  women — no. ' ' 
And  in  this  there  was  much  discernment; 
for  the  dress  of  men  among  the  Japanese 
has  too  much  flowing  drapery  to  make  it  a 
good  working-dress,  while,  on  the  other 
hand,  the  dress  of  women,  especially  of  el- 
derly women,  has  in  it  so  much  of  what 
might  be  called  the  large  charity  of  reserve 
— but  here  I  perceive  that  I  am  entering 
upon  a  domain  in  which  my  abundant  igno- 
rance would  make  me  an  easy  prey  to  femi- 
nine criticism,  and  I  forbear. 

I  wish,  however,  that  in  this  connection  I 
might  give  the  substance  of  a  conversation 
which  I  had  with  the  distinguished  states- 
man whom  I  have  just  quoted.  The  two 
foremost  men  in  Japan  to-day,  for  intel- 
lectual force  and  high  qualities  of  leader- 
ship, are  the  Marquis  Ito  and  Count  Okumo. 
The  former  was  kind  enough  to  intimate 
his  desire  to  see  me  and  to  make  an  appoint- 
ment to  that  end,  of  which,  however,  my  en- 
gagements prevented  me  from  availing 
myself.  With  the  latter  I  had  for  a  good 
part  of  an  afternoon  a  conversation  which 
was  altogether  unreserved,  in  which  I  was 
permitted  to  ask  all  sorts  of  questions,  and 
throughout  which  I  was  impressed  with  the 
rare  penetration,  grasp,  philosophic'  can- 


94    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

dor,  and  statesmanlike  sense  of  proportion 
of  an  unusually  elevated  and  courageous 
thinker.  Happy  would  it  be  for  Japan  if 
her  policies  could  be  directed  by  so  firm 
and  competent  a  hand. 

Count  Okumo  was  full  of  hope  for  the 
future  of  his  people;  was  not  insensible  to 
the  dangers  of  the  hasty  superimposition 
upon  an  Asiatic  people  of  Occidental  forms 
of  government;  and  described  in  a  very 
interesting  way  the  tentative  experiments 
which  were  in  progress  for  the  purpose  of 
training  the  people  in  some  of  those  earlier 
departures  from  pure  paternalism  which 
are  involved  in  the  erection  of  something 
like  an  elective  system  in  connection  with 
municipal  rule. 

Did  he  not  apprehend,  I  asked,  that 
among  a  people  for  so  many  generations 
wonted  to  the  feudal  system,  with  its  tribe 
or  clan  and  its  tribal  ruler,  there  would  be 
danger  of  the  reassertion  of  the  power  and 
influence  of  the  feudal  lord  as  against  the 
freedom  and  purity  of  our  elective  system  I 

Yes,  he  answered,  he  recognized  that 
danger,  though  he  recognized  also,  laugh- 
ingly, that  it  lurked  in  other  systems  where 
the  feudal  lord  or  chief  was  sometimes  de- 
scribed as  a  ''boss";  but  he  believed  that  a 
higher  and  wider  education  was  the  remedy 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  JAPAN  95 

for  that,  and  that  the  secret  of  the  correc- 
tion of  political  as  of  other  evils  lay,  first  of 
all,  in  the  intelligent  recognition  of  them. 
And  in  this  connection  it  was  interesting  to 
have  pointed  out  to  me  by  our  able  minister 
to  Japan  the  schools  for  girls  and  young 
women  which  the  count  had  founded  and 
maintained  at  his  own  expense.  There 
could  be  no  better  witness  to  his  large  faith 
in  the  nobler  future  of  his  own  people.  At 
the  foundation  of  all  national  greatness  lies 
a  competent  motherhood,  and  it  is  a  note  of 
the  highest  promise  that  so  wise  a  leader 
should  have  recognized  that  fact  and  set 
about  providing  for  it. 

That,  in  connection  with  the  progress  of 
Japan  in  these  directions,  there  has  been  of 
late  an  impatience  of  her  earlier  teachers 
along  these  and  other  lines  of  Western 
progress,  has  excited  considerable  com- 
ment, and  a  not  unnatural  irritation  in  the 
United  States.  A  little  while  ago  Japan 
could  not  have  too  much  or  too  many  of  us. 
"But  now,"  as  an  aggrieved  American 
manufacturer  said  to  me,  "we  no  sooner 
build  their  factories  for  them  and  teach 
them  how  to  run  them  than  they  dismiss 
our  superintendents  and  pack  them  home 
again. ' '  And  why  should  they  not !  They 
are  building  factories  and  maintaining 


96    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEEOW 

them  for  their  own  profit,  not  ours;  and  I 
apprehend  that  American  unpopularity  in 
Japan  is  due,  at  any  rate  partly,  to  our 
over-eagerness  to  seize  opportunities  which 
the  people  themselves  have  discerned  or 
created,  and  of  which  they  themselves  not 
unnaturally  desire  to  reap  the  benefits. 
Personally,  I  cannot  say  that  I  encountered 
any  evidence  that  foreigners  are  not  as  well 
treated  and  as  cordially  welcomed  in  Japan 
as  they  are,  say,  in  Germany  or  France. 
The  best  that  the  world  has  is  now,  so  far 
as  they  have  awakened  to  the  value  of  it, 
within  their  reach ;  and  if  the  process  of  as- 
similation is  as  rapid  as  the  process  of 
appropriation,  no  one  may  undertake  to 
predict  the  measure  of  their  future  achieve- 
ment. They  have  great  and  largely  unde- 
veloped national  resources,  exceptional  en- 
ergy, a  curiously  quick  prehensile  quality 
in  all  mental  processes,  and  a  boundless 
ambition. 

And  yet  all  these  will  not  make  a  great 
nation,  and  that  other  thing  which  does  they 
are  confessedly  without.  I  say  i '  confessed- 
ly," because  in  a  leading  journal  of  Japan  I 
found  the  following  remarkable  words: 

We  have  recently  ventured  to  call  attention 
in  these  columns  to  the  demoralizing  effect  of 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  JAPAN  97 

the  present  transition  of  this  country  from  old 
to  new.  We  do  not  pretend  to  have  done  any- 
thing like  justice  to  a  question  so  complicated 
and  so  difficult  to  deal  with ;  but  we  believe  that 
no  sober-minded  student  of  contemporary  life 
and  thought  in  this  country,  be  he  a  Japanese  or 
a  foreigner,  will  dispute  the  fact  that  our  people 
are  now  passing  through  an  extremely  critical 
period  of  their  moral  development.  Nor  will  any 
such  person  be  disposed  to  deny  that  the  symp- 
toms of  the  moral  malady  as  revealed  in  various 
walks  of  life  are  sufficiently  grave  to  demand 
serious  reflection  on  the  part  of  the  leaders  of 
thought  and  action  among  us.  Now  the  question 
is,  What  is  the  remedy,  or  is  there  any  ?  Before, 
however,  proceeding  to  talk  of  the  remedy,  it 
would  be  well  to  see  if  the  patient  is  at  all  con- 
scious of  the  gravity  of  his  situation,  for  in  the 
case  of  all  moral  diseases  the  awakening  of  the 
patient  to  the  danger  to  which  he  is  exposed  is 
the  essential  condition  for  the  efficacy  of  any 
remedy  that  may  be  applied  to  his  complaint. 
From  various  indications  noticed  in  public  life 
as  well  as  in  private  intercourse,  we  are  led  to 
conclude  that  the  national  consciousness  is  be- 
ginning to  feel  that  something  is  wrong  with  the 
country  in  matters  of  conduct  and  belief.  There 
have  never  been  wanting  men  who  have  warned 
their  countrymen  against  the  moral  danger  to 
which  they  were  exposed.  Leaders  of  thought 
and  reform  like  Mr.  Fukuzawa,  Mr.  Sugiura, 
and  some  others  have  been  calling  the  attention 
of  the  people  to  this  very  subject  during  the  past 

7 


98    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

fifteen  years  or  more.  But  the  warnings  of  these 
moralists  have  hitherto  failed  to  produce  any 
marked  impression  upon  the  nation ;  it  is  neces- 
sary that  the  evils  of  the  times  should  make  a 
certain  progress  in  order  that  their  real  signifi- 
cance may  be  brought  home  to  the  generality 
of  the  people.  Sufficient  progress  now  seems 
to  have  been  made  in  this  undesirable  direction, 
for,  as  already  stated,  there  are  unmistakable 
indications  that  the  thinking  portion  of  the  peo- 
ple is  slowly  awakening  to  the  reality  of  the 
situation. 

As  to  the  question  of  the  remedy,  a  large  num- 
ber of  our  readers  will,  we  presume,  answer  that 
nothing  but  religion  will  save  the  Japanese  from 
utter  moral  degeneration.  Or,  to  put  it  in  a  con- 
crete form,  they  will  say  that  the  only  hope  for 
us  lies  in  our  conversion  to  Christianity.  We 
certainly  recognize  in  Christianity  a  form  of  re- 
ligion inculcating  a  lofty  standard  of  morality, 
powerful  as  a  motive  power.  We  recognize  in  it 
a  factor  which  has  played  an  important  part  in 
the  development  of  European  civilization. 

But,  admitting  all  these  things,  we  cannot  be- 
lieve that  it  will  ever  succeed  in  getting  a  firm 
hold  upon  the  minds  of  the  educated  class.  Men 
of  this  class  have  for  centuries  lived  and  died 
under  a  system  of  morality  which  inculcates  vir- 
tue for  virtue's  sake  and  entirely  dispenses  with 
supernatural  sanctions  of  any  sort.  The  result 
of  acquaintance  with  the  sciences  brought  by  the 
new  civilization  has  certainly  not  tended  to  turn 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  JAPAN  99 

the  educated  Japanese  from  their  traditional 
attitude  of  mind  on  religious  matters. 

If  there  is  little  hope  for  the  adoption  of 
Christianity  by  the  educated  sections  of  the  peo- 
ple, is  there  better  hope  in  that  quarter  for  Bud- 
dhism? We  should  say  decidedly  not.  Bud- 
dhism in  its  pure  form  has  never  been  able  to 
make  much  headway  in  Japan.  As  we  pointed 
out  in  these  columns  some  two  years  ago,  it  has 
only  been  able  to  obtain  a  footing  here  by  adapt- 
ing itself  to  and  humoring  the  original  beliefs 
of  the  people.  It  has  certainly  done  much  good 
to  Japan ;  and  utterly  degenerate  and  hopelessly 
ignorant  as  are  the  majority  of  its  priests,  it 
is  the  professed  religion  of  the  bulk  of  the  peo- 
ple and  will  die  hard.  But  the  days  of  its  vigor 
are  long  since  past ;  there  is  nothing  to  encourage 
the  hope  that  it  will  yet  revive,  at  all  events  in 
such  a  form  as  to  touch  the  imagination  and  in- 
fluence the  life  of  the  educated  class. 

As  to  Shinto,  we  may  dismiss  it  altogether  out 
of  our  consideration.  It  can  hardly  be  called  a 
religion,  and  as  a  system  of  morality  it  is  hope- 
lessly encumbered  with  a  mass  of  legendary  lore 
which  will  hardly  bear  the  light  of  scientific 
criticism. 

The  reader  will  doubtless  ask,  "If  you  reject 
the  help  of  all  religions,  what  is  your  remedy 
for  the  complaint  you  speak  of?"  To  be  frank, 
we  have  to  confess  that  we  cannot  think  of  any 
specific  cure  for  the  present  case,  unless  some 
teacher  of  extraordinary  gifts  makes  his  appear- 


100  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

ance  among  us  to  preach  moral  truths  with  a 
force  and  authority  which  belong  to  true  genius. 
If  there  has  been  a  serious  moral  relapse 
among  us,  it  has  been  the  result  of  the  shock 
occasioned  by  our  contact  with  a  new  civilization. 
In  the  general  confusion  that  has  attended  our 
effort  in  breaking  loose  from  the  old  order  of 
things,  it  was  natural  that  we  should  have  fallen 
into  the  error  of  carrying  Vandalism  into  the 
domain  of  moral  life.  The  evil  results  of  that 
error  have  now  reached  a  point  at  which  the  na- 
tional consciousness  cannot  help  awakening  to 
the  gravity  of  the  situation. 

It  will  be  impossible,  I  think,  for  any 
thoughtful  person,  whatever  may  be  his 
creed  or  want  of  creed,  to  read  these  words 
without  a  sense  of  their  profound  pathos. 
This  ancient  people,  waking  with  a  new 
life,  becomes  conscious  that  neither  arms 
nor  battle-ships  nor  machinery,  neither 
railways,  factories,  nor  constitutional  gov- 
ernment, make  a  great  state ;  because  none 
of  them,  nor  all  of  them  put  together,  pro- 
duce that  essential  righteousness  which  is 
the  essential  strength  of  nations  as  of  men. 
Misconceiving  what  that  is  for  which  the 
supernatural  stands  in  the  Christian  re- 
ligion, the  writer  whom  I  have  quoted  fails 
to  recognize  that  the  supreme  power  of  that 
religion  lies  in  the  fact  that  it  furnishes 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  JAPAN  101 

precisely  that  for  which,  unknowingly,  he 
asks  a  "teacher  of  extraordinary  gifts  .  .  . 
to  preach  moral  truths  with  a  force  and 
authority  which  belong  to  true  genius"— 
to  do  this,  and  infinitely  more  than  this, 
by  the  spell  of  a  divine  Personality  that 
touches  and  conquers  the  heart  of  man  to- 
day even  as  it  did  when  that  spell  first 
broke  upon  the  moral  consciousness  of  men 
two  thousand  years  ago.  For  that,  though 
as  yet  it  but  imperfectly  discerns  it,  the  new 
Japan  is  waiting.  May  the  day  be  not  long 
distant  when  from  the  lamps  that  Christian 
hands  have  lighted,  and  still  more  from  the 
lives  that  Christian  men  and  women  have 
lived  there,  it  shall  see  and  own  its  coming 
Teacher,  Saviour,  King! 


IV 

IMPRESSIONS    OF    INDIA 


IV 

IMPRESSIONS    OF   INDIA 

IF  one  were  asked  to  express  in  a  single 
phrase  that  which  exists  in  the  Western 
mind  as  its  distinctive  conception  of  the 
land  and  the  people  included  within  the 
geographical  boundaries  of  what  we  are 
wont  to  describe  as  India,  it  would  oftenest 
be  done,  I  imagine,  by  calling  it  the  land  of 
mystery.  Western  peoples  are  ordinarily, 
it  may  be  presumed,  as  ignorant  of  China 
or  Japan  as  they  are  of  India ;  and  travelers 
have  probably  been  as  often  obliged  to  cor- 
rect their  earlier  impressions  of  either  of 
these  countries  in  the  light  of  a  fuller 
knowledge.  But  no  other  people  have  in 
them  so  much  that  has  been  inscrutable,  and 
that  continues  to  be  so,  as  those  various 
tribes  and  states  that  extend  from  the  Rus- 
sian frontier  to  the  Indian  Ocean. 

And  the  interesting  thing  is  that  this  ele- 
ment of  mystery  does  not  disappear  with 
closer  observation  or  more  intimate  ac- 

105 


106    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORKOW 

quaintance.  It  would  be  a  small  thing  to 
say  that  my  Bengali  servant  was  inscruta- 
ble to  me  after  several  weeks  of  his  con- 
stant companionship  by  day  and  by  night, 
in  travel,  rest-houses,  dak-bungalows,  and 
inns,  on  shipboard,  and  in  those  frequent 
and  quite  unreserved  conferences  which 
are  indispensable  in  travel  between  a  for- 
eigner and  one  who  is  guide,  valet,  and 
interpreter  all  in  one.  Any  traveler  would 
say,  doubtless,  that  to  understand  the  occult 
mental  processes  and  cryptographic  speech 
of  any  foreign  servant  is  easily  beyond  the 
cleverness  of  the  most  experienced  mind- 
reader.  But  this  inability  to  comprehend, 
and  still  more  to  forecast,  the  mental  pro- 
cesses of  these  Orientals  is,  I  have  found, 
unreservedly  admitted  even  by  those  who 
have  known  them  for  a  generation.  Indeed, 
the  dramatic  element  of  British  rule  in  In- 
dia largely  consists  in  that  absence  of 
certainty  as  to  the  character,  motives,  or 
possible  conduct  of  those  over  whom  they 
are  set  which  I  have  often  heard  admitted 
on  the  part  of  their  rulers. 

It  is  this  that  must  needs  lend  to  the  land 
and  to  its  people  an  exceptional  and  peren- 
nial interest.  As  in  the  costumes  and  cus- 
toms of  other  Eastern  nations  there  is 
forever  wanting  that  note  of  almost  star- 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  INDIA  107 

tling  picturesqueness  which  salutes  the 
stranger  in  India,  so  it  is  with  all  that 
costume  and  custom  stand  for.  Prodi- 
gal wealth,  Oriental  splendor,  subtlety  in 
speech  and  action,  inexhaustible  craft,  un- 
wearied furtiveness,  swift  and  secret  re- 
venges, hot  passion  and  its  reckless  blow, 
far-seeing  purposes  and  their  marvelous 
adroitness  of  scheme  and  instrument,  the 
tragedies  of  racial  or  tribal  ambitions,  the 
carelessness  of  life  in  warfare,  the  unspeak- 
able perfidies  of  intrigue  in  the  lives  of 
kings  and  courts,  the  surface  gentleness 
and  obsequiousness,  and  the  hard  glitter 
of  undying  hatreds  that  gleam  beneath 
them — these  are  some  of  the  elements  that 
long  ago  made  up  life  in  that  strange  land, 
and  that  are  a  long  way  from  having  van- 
ished out  of  it  to-day. 

Under  these  circumstances,  the  presence 
of  British  rule  in  India,  and  the  story  of  its 
achievements,  is  of  its  kind  one  of  the  most 
wonderful  things  in  human  history.  It  does 
not  in  the  smallest  degree  matter  that  what 
has  come  to  pass  was  not  always  a  thing  of 
forecast  or  the  fruit  of  a  set  purpose  in  the 
beginning ;  the  marvelous  thing  is  that,  with 
no  hesitating  or  unequal  steps,  it  has  come 
to  pass.  And,  indeed,  this  is,  in  its  way,  one 
of  the  most  impressive  and  significant  f ea- 


108  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

tures  of  the  whole  Anglo-Indian  historic 
evolution.  The  "  Honorable  East  India 
Company"  came  into  existence  somewhere 
about  the  beginning  of  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury. It  was  when  Elizabeth  was  queen, 
and  when  that  great  renaissance  that 
stirred  England  coincidently  with  her 
emancipation  from  Latin  ecclesiastical  tra- 
ditions and  the  benumbing  influence  of 
Latin  standards  of  morals  and  conduct  was 
throbbing  through  the  veins  of  a  great  peo- 
ple and  kindling  all  the  avenues  of  her  life, 
domestic,  social,  civic,  and  commercial,  with 
the  glow  of  a  new  and  nobler  life.  "The 
Governor  and  Company  of  Merchants  of 
London  trading  to  the  East  Indies, ' '  as  the 
corporation  was  styled,  began  in  a  modest 
way  by  sending  out  to  the  East  a  few  ships 
to  purchase  silks,  spices,  and  other  Indian 
products.  As  the  trade  grew,  an  ambassa- 
dor was  sent  by  King  James  to  Jahangir 
to  conduct  such  negotiations  with  the  In- 
dian ruler  as  should  best  protect  and  foster 
the  nascent  commerce.  That  was  the  begin- 
ning. What  a  splendid  galaxy  of  sailors, 
soldiers,  rulers,  statesmen,  merchants  it  has 
been  that,  step  by  step,  has  built  up  the 
great  empire  of  to-day !  In  tracing  its  his- 
tory it  is  instructive,  and  especially  for 
Americans,  who  have  but  lately  embarked 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  INDIA  109 

upon  a  similar  enterprise,  to  see  that  that 
history  was  clouded  by  features  as  little 
honorable  as  they  were  equitable.  The 
earlier  Indian  governor  had  no  salary,  and 
the  art  of  the  ' '  grand  squeeze, ' '  as  the  Chi- 
nese describe  it,  was  remorselessly  applied, 
too  often,  by  one  who  was  the  depositary  of 
a  largely  irresponsible  power.  The  Honor- 
able East  India  Company  was  for  more 
than  two  hundred  years  a  corporation 
whose  British  servants  obtained  and  held 
their  places  largely  by  pure  favoritism,  and 
whose  methods,  it  must  be  owned,  were 
often  eminently  characteristic  of  officials 
holding  place  quite  independent  of  their 
merits.  Under  these  circumstances,  the 
only  wonder  is  that  the  "Honorable  Com- 
pany ' '  was  able  so  successfully  to  hold  what 
from  time  to  time  it  acquired,  and  to  push 
its  enterprises  and  its  acquisitions  to  such 
large  and  enduring  successes.  The  expla- 
nation must  be  found  in  the  fact  that,  cor- 
rupt and  unscrupulous  as  the  earlier  meth- 
ods of  the  East  India  Company  may  often 
have  been,  on  the  whole  they  were  on  a 
higher  plane  than  those  of  the  native 
princes  whom  they  supplanted. 

Of  the  rule  of  these,  it  must  be  owned, 
the  story  was  ordinarily  a  tragic  and  cruel 
one.  The  first  British  settlers  in  India 


110  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

found  the  land  rent  and  divided  by  inter- 
nal dissensions,  and  its  ruling  powers  in  a 
state  of  constant  warfare  upon  one  another. 
In  these  wars  the  native  princes  learned, 
after  a  time,  to  seek  the  aid  of  those  small 
bodies  of  the  East  India  Company's  troops, 
both  European  and  native,  which  the  com- 
pany had  found  it  necessary  to  organize 
for  the  protection  of  its  own  settlements. 
When,  however,  such  aid  was  given,  it  had 
to  be  paid  for  in  one  way  or  another;  and 
thus  the  grants  of  land  were  made  on  which, 
afterward,  were  built  Bombay,  Calcutta, 
etc.  As  the  student  of  Indian  history  will 
remember,  these  were  not  always  securely 
held,  and  caste  prejudice,  racial  prejudice, 
and  the  conquering  propensities  of  tribal 
leaders  led  occasionally  to  attacks  upon 
the  English  settlements,  such  as  the  sack- 
ing of  Calcutta  by  Siraj-ud-Daula,  Nawab 
of  Bengal,  with  all  the  consequent  horrors 
of  the  prison  called  the  Black  Hole,  into 
which  one  hundred  and  forty-six  Euro- 
peans were  driven  at  night,  and  out  of 
which  only  twenty-three  persons  were  taken 
alive  the  next  morning.  But  during  the  fol- 
lowing year  (1757)  Clive  won  the  battle 
of  Plassey,  the  English  were  supreme  in 
Bengal,  and  India  began  to  see  the  begin- 
ning of  the  end. 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  INDIA  111 

Of  the  end,  did  I  say?  But  who  will  be 
bold  enough  even  to-day  to  prophesy  the 
end?  I  shall  speak  later  of  the  reasons 
which  would  seem  to  make  it  impossible, 
with  any  considerable  degree  of  certainty, 
to  forecast  that  end ;  but  in  the  meantime  I 
wish  to  refer  to  some  of  the  conspicuous 
features  of  British  rule  in  India  which 
make  it,  as  I  conceive,  the  greatest  object- 
lesson  in  colonial  government  in  the  history 
of  the  world. 

And  in  order  to  appreciate  the  situation, 
both  as  it  existed  originally  and  as  it  exists 
to-day,  it  must  be  remembered  that  India  is 
not  in  any  sense  a  homogeneous  country. 
The  Indian  empire  contains  1,560,000 
square  miles  and  a  population  of  two  hun- 
dred and  eighty-seven  millions,  and  these 
extend  from  the  eighth  to  the  thirty-seventh 
degree  of  north  latitude,  and  from  67°  east 
to  99°  east  longitude. 

It  follows,  of  course,  that  there  are  great 
diversities  of  climate,  soil,  custom,  and  lan- 
guage, as  there  are  also  of  native  rule  and 
religion.  Even  to-day  the  languages  of  the 
north  and  south  are  wholly  different,  and 
when  I  asked  my  Bengali  servant,  who  was 
a  native  of  central  India  and  had  traveled 
with  me  there,  to  accompany  me  to  the 
southern  provinces,  he  very  properly  urged 


112  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

that  he  could  be  of  little  or  no  use  to  me,  be- 
cause he  could  not  speak  the  languages  of 
those  provinces.     More  than  this,  as  the 
modern  student  will  see  if  he  looks  at  a  map 
of  India  and  traces  the  ancient  sovereign- 
ties for  which  its  provincial  names  once 
stood,  these  various  sections  of  the  Indian 
peninsula  were  divided  from  one  another 
by  a  score  of  petty  sovereignties  whose  mu- 
tual hatreds  were  at  once  deep  and  malig- 
nant.   Indeed,  the  way  in  which  these  sur- 
vive to-day  in  India,  where,  superimposed 
upon  them  all,  is  the  strong  hand  of  British 
rule,  is  at  once  tragic  and  pathetic.     The 
traveler  in  India  is  early  arrested,  in  his 
scrutiny  of  the  natives,  by  the  curious  mark 
painted  down,  or  across,  their  foreheads — a 
round  red  disk,  a  yellow  bar  with  displayed 
ends,  three  white  stripes,  and  the  like,  in 
an  endless  variety  of  combinations.    These 
are  very  commonly  mistaken  by  the  for- 
eigner as  designations  of  caste,  but  they 
are  nothing  of  the  sort.     They  are  tribal 
designations,   and  they  still  assert  them- 
selves,   though    the    tribal    ruler— prince, 
nawab,  raja,  whatever  he  may  have  been— 
has  long  ago  been  dethroned,  or  is  to-day 
—as,  if  he  exists  at  all,  he  so  often  is— no 
more  than  the  stuffed  and  bedizened  simu- 
lacrum of  a  tribal  ruler.    Such  signs  are  a 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  INDIA  113 

dramatic  witness  to  the  intensity  of  that 
tribal  bond  with  which,  in  the  future  his- 
tory of  India  as  in  the  past,  the  conquer- 
ing power  must  reckon. 

It  was  with  this  vast  and  heterogeneous, 
not  homogeneous,  people  that  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  had  to  deal  when  the  East  India 
Company  began  to  trade  with  the  Indian 
peninsula,  and  among  whom  it  has  won  its 
most  splendid  successes.  I  do  not  speak  of 
other  colonial  settlements  in  India,  French, 
Dutch,  or  Spanish,  because  they  have 
largely  disappeared,  and  because  the  sur- 
vival of  that  other  power  which  has  super- 
seded them  has  been  eminently  a  survival 
of  the  fittest.  One  of  these  days, — the  time 
has  not  come  for  it  yet, — some  dispassion- 
ate student  will  write  a  comparative  history 
of  colonization,  and  will  point  out  the  ele- 
ments that  have  contributed,  where  coloni- 
zation has  succeeded,  to  its  success.  It  is 
quite  certain  that  "originally,  in  the  case  of 
India  and  the  East  India  Company,  they 
did  not  in  any  considerable  degree  exist, 
any  more  than,  in  the  case  of  the  French 
colonies,  they  exist  in  Algeria  to-day.  The 
first  aim  of  a  great  commercial  corporation 
was,  naturally  enough,  commercial  gain; 
and  while  Warren  Hastings  was  undoubt- 
edly not  the  monster  that  Burke  painted 


114  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

him,  yet  so  long  as  the  East  India  Company 
had  large  and  undefined  and  exclusive 
rights  in  India,  it  is  not  surprising  that 
they  should  have  abused  them.  The  Brit- 
ish Parliament  did  wisely  when  it  annulled 
the  East  India  Company's  charter  of  1600, 
and  later  followed  the  lead  of  Pitt,  in  1784, 
in  passing  his  India  bill,  and,  later  still,  in 
taking  those  successive  steps  that  trans- 
ferred the  custody  of  India  to  the  crown. 
It  is  difficult  for  one  who  visits  India  for 
the  first  time  to  realize  that  this  was  done 
so  lately  as  1858.  That  was  the  year  follow- 
ing the  Mutiny;  and  the  bloody  history  of 
the  Mutiny  prepares  the  modern  student  to 
understand  something  of  the  Indian  mind 
and  temper.  As  Sir  W.  Hunter,  than  whom 
no  higher  authority  in  Indian  history  ex- 
ists, has  put  it: 

During  seven  hundred  years  the  warring  races 
of  Central  Asia  and  Afghanistan  filled  up  their 
measure  of  bloodshed  and  pillage  to  the  full. 
Sometimes  they  returned  with  their  spoil  to  their 
mountains,  leaving  only  desolation  behind ;  some- 
times they  killed  off  or  drove  out  the  former  in- 
habitants and  settled  down  in  India  as  lords  of 
the  soil ;  sometimes  they  founded  imperial  dynas- 
ties, destined  to  be  crushed  each  in  its  turn  by 
a  new  host  sweeping  into  India  through  the 
Afghan  passes.  The  precise  meaning  of  inva- 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  INDIA  115 

sion  in  India  during  the  last  [eighteenth]  cen- 
tury may  be  gathered  from  the  following  facts: 
It  signified  not  merely  a  host  of  twenty  to  a  hun- 
dred thousand  barbarians  on  the  march,  paying 
for  nothing  and  eating  up  every  town  and  cot- 
tage and  farm-yard;  burning  and  slaughtering 
on  the  slightest  provocation,  and  often  in  mere 
sport.  It  usually  also  meant  a  grand  final  sack 
and  massacre  at  the  capital  of  the  invaded 
country. 

And  besides  these  wars  from  without  were 
the  intestine  conflicts  in  which  Hindu 
fought  with  Hindu,  Mohammedan  with  Mo- 
hammedan, and  each  with  the  other.  The 
readers  of  Macaulay  will  remember  his  de- 
scription of  the  unspeakable  brutalities  of 
the  Mahrattas.  The  story  of  the  bloody 
ravages  of  Pindarees,  of  the  Sultan  Mo- 
hammed Shah  of  Gulbarga,  and  of  the 
Hindu  Maharaja  of  Vijayanager  (the  first- 
named  of  whom  swore  an  oath  on  the  Koran 
that  he  would  not  sheathe  the  sword  until 
he  had  put  to  death  a  hundred  thousand 
infidels),  is  told  by  Meadows  Taylor  in  his 
''Indian  History"  with  a  ghastly  detail 
that  no  one  who  has  read  it  can  recall  with- 
out a  shudder. 

It  was  amid  such  a  condition  of  interne- 
cine warfare  and  unrest  as  this  that  the  first 
English  settlers  in  India  found  themselves. 


116  THE  EAST  OP  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW       ' 

I  may  not  attempt  to  trace  here  the  succes- 
sive steps  by  which  British  rule  has  built  up 
in  that  land  the  present  structure  of  order, 
peace,  and  security.  But  however  men  may 
differ  about  the  wisdom  or  originality  of 
those  successive  steps,  there  can  be  no 
question  as  to  that  which  is  their  founda- 
tion-stone. I  was  exceptionally  fortunate, 
while  in  India,  in  coming  into  more  than 
ordinarily  close  contact  with  educated  na- 
tives, both  Hindu  and  Mohammedan,  who 
spoke  to  me  often  with  marked  unreserve  of 
the  rule  under  which  they  lived,  and  of  the 
rulers  who  administered  it.  I  suppose  no- 
body who  reads  these  pages  will  expect  me 
to  say  that  they  spoke  always  with  enthusi- 
asm of  the  one,  or  with  affection  of  the 
other.  They  did  nothing  of  the  sort;  and 
indeed  I  have  observed  that  in  our  own  be- 
loved land  and  under  our  own  honored  rul- 
ers it  cannot  be  said  to  be  an  invariable 
experience  that  we  refer  to  the  law  or  to  the 
administrator  of  the  law  in  terms  of  either 
admiration  or  approval.  In  other  words, 
criticism  and  fault-finding,  whether  con- 
cerning the  rule  or  the  ruler,  would  appear 
to  be  considered  as  a  primary  function  of 
the  modern  citizen.  Well,  it  is  not  greatly 
different  in  India,  Why  should  it  be?  It 
is  a  land  of  newspapers,  of  free  speech,  and 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  INDIA  117 

of  much  public  and  published  fault-finding 
of  officials  and  their  decisions,  great  and 
small.  We  should  say  that  among  ourselves 
this  is  wholesome  and  normal,  and  far  more 
to  be  desired  than  smothered  discontent  or 
a  concealed  smoldering  hostility.  I  do  not 
see  why  it  should  not  be  so  in  India,  espe- 
cially when  one  takes  into  consideration  an 
additional  element  in  the  situation  there 
which  is,  in  fact,  of  all  the  most  important. 
As  I  have  said,  I  conversed  with  great 
unreserve  with  many  natives  concerning 
British  rule  in  India,  and  influential  men 
among  them  expressed  themselves  to  me 
with  great  freedom.  They  had  grievances 
to  rehearse  and  officials  and  their  acts  to 
criticize,  but  this  one  thing,  from  first  to 
last,  always  and  everywhere,  was  plain— 
that  they  recognized  that  with  the  mainte- 
nance and  permanence  of  British  rule  in 
India  marched  the  safety  of  life  and  prop- 
erty, freedom  to  go  about  unmolested  on 
one's  honest  errands,  the  peace  and  good 
order,  in  one  word,  of  the  social  fabric. 
They  would  like  to  see  the  old  dynasties, 
sovereignties,  greater  or  lesser  principali- 
ties and  powers  with  which  in  other  days 
their  race  or  family  had  been  identified,  re- 
stored? Yes,  perhaps,  if  it  could 'be  done 
without  too  great  a  cost.  But  the  cost? 


118     THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

To  face  that  it  was  plain  enough  they  had 
no  stomach.  Under  the  present  conditions 
the  humblest  Indian  servant  knows  this  one 
fact,  which  of  all  others  is  of  paramount 
consequence  to  him:  he  is  no  longer  the 
creature  of  another  man's  whim;  his  life, 
his  property,  his  right  to  go  to  and  fro, 
his  family  ties,  his  task  or  employment- 
all  these  things  are  within  his  own  control. 
That  he  knows.  And  he  knows  that  British 
rule  in  India  has  given  this  to  him  and  se- 
cured it  to  him.  He  knows  that  underneath 
all  the  dealing  of  this  alien  race  with  him 
and  his  there  lies  the  broad  stone  of  justice ; 
that  no  man,  stranger  or  home-born,  may 
wrong  him  with  impunity;  and  that,  how- 
ever weak  he  may  be,  he  need  be  the  favor- 
ite of  no  prince,  the  fawning  tool  of  no  ca- 
pricious rule,  in  order  to  secure  for  himself 
and  those  dear  to  him  their  rights  and  his 
own. 

Now,  then,  carry  this  consideration  from 
the  lowest  to  the  highest  in  the  Indian 
social  scale.  With  a  consummate  tact  and 
wisdom  which  cannot  be  too  highly  praised, 
the  present  ruling  power  in  India,  instead 
of  sweeping  into  oblivion  with  its  strong 
hand  the  various  powers  which  it  had  su- 
perseded, has  dealt  with  each  one  of  them, 
great  and  small,  in  accordance  with  this 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  INDIA  119 

large  law  of  equity.  If  a  state  or  a  ruler 
had  in  them  anything  to  conserve,  the  im- 
perial authority  has  conserved  it.  If  a  ma- 
haraja  showed  himself  amenable  to  reason, 
and  willing  to  hold  such  power  as  was 
intrusted  to  him  from  a  power  above  him 
which  was  strong  enough  to  maintain  his 
just  right,  some  modus  Vivendi  was  speed- 
ily devised  by  which  the  status  quo  ante 
was  maintained.  Around  the  person  of  the 
Viceroy  of  India,  by  gradual  but  sure  pro- 
gressions, the  great  Indian  princes  have 
been  drawn  in  a  Council  of  State  for  the 
consideration  of  common  interests  and  the 
maintenance  of  common  rights.  Doubtless 
there  are  sometimes  restlessness,  impa- 
tience of  the  dry  Western  rule,  resentment, 
and  smoldering  enmity.  But  suppose  that 
the  powers  which  once  ruled  India  could 
recover  their  old  sovereignties,  there  is  not 
one  of  them  that  does  not  know  that  the 
next  step  would  be  to  fly  at  one  another's 
throats.  It  does  not  seem  to  have  occurred 
to  people  who  are  fond  of  prophesying  that 
British  rule  cannot  hope  to  maintain  itself 
in  India,  because  it  is  an  alien  rule,  and  who 
sagely  remind  us  that  when  once  the  man 
is  found  from  among  themselves  who  can 
unite  the  various  Indian  states  and  nation- 
alities of  the  elder  time,  this  united  India 


120  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEROW 

will  be  strong  enough  to  sweep  the  Saxon 
out  of  his  country,  root  and  branch— it  does 
not,  I  say,  seem  to  have  occurred  to  these 
clever  seers  that  the  present  rule  in  India 
has  built  up  a  strong  and  wide-spread  con- 
stituency to  whom  such  a  prospect  is  only 
and  wholly  distasteful.     For  when  some 
such  great  revolutionary  movement  had  ac- 
complished its  purpose  and  the  last  Briton 
had  been  either  butchered  or  expelled  from 
India,  then  there  would  arise  the  question 
which  to-day  the  educated  and,  above  all, 
the  wealthy  native  would  ask  himself,  in 
the  spirit  of  a  modern  Frenchman,   "Et 
apres?"     A  great  Indian  merchant  with 
whom  I  became  acquainted,  and  who  felt,  I 
suppose,  that  he  might  express  himself  to 
an  American  with  such  freedom  as  he  might 
not   otherwise   indulge   in,    referred   with 
some  feeling  to  the  fact  that,  except  undef 
limited  and  special  conditions,  the  people  of 
India  were  not  trusted  with  arms,  nor  al- 
lowed to  govern  themselves.    "But,  then," 
he  said,  with  that  quick  mental  turn  which 
is  so  curious  a  characteristic  of  the  Oriental 
mind, ' '  if  we  were  permitted  to  govern  our- 
selves, it  would  take  a  great  deal  of  money 
and  time  and  involve  a  great  many  risks, 
while,  now,  British  imperialism  does  it  all 
for  us  and  leaves  us  free  to  go  about  our 


IMPRESSIONS  OP  INDIA  121 

business  with,  perhaps,  a  greater  sense  of 
security  than  we  should  otherwise  have." 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  there  was  no  "per- 
haps ' '  in  his  mind  whatever.  He  was  a  rich 
man,  and  he  knew— there  was  no  slightest 
question  of  surmise — that  if  British  rule 
were  to  vanish  out  of  India,  security  for  him 
and  his  would  speedily  vanish  with  it. 

An  observer  of  romantic  tendencies 
might  easily  deplore  this,  and  ask,  "Is  the 
old  heroic,  if  often  barbaric,  spirit  of  India 
a  vanished  quantity?"  I  may  not  under- 
take to  answer  that  question.  One  thing  is 
certain:  British  rule  in  India  has  taught 
its  people  to  value  peace,  the  safety  of  life 
and  property,  and  the  privilege  of  going 
quietly  and  securely  about  one's  business. 
I  am  not  sure  that  we  who  call  ourselves  of 
the  superior  races  are  indifferent  to  these 
things. 

But  that  rule  has  taught  the  people  of 
India  a  great  deal  more.  I  suppose  that  to 
a  certain  class  of  minds  the  temper  that 
prompts  one  to  fly  at  his  neighbor's  throat 
and  to  resent  an  injury  with  a  blow  will 
always  be  regarded  as  the  *  *  heroic ' '  spirit ; 
but  there  is  another  view  of  heroism  which 
it  is  to  be  hoped  will  continue  to  have  its 
disciples,  and  which  holds  that  self-re- 
straint and  courageous  endurance,  self- 


122  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORKOW 

reliance  and  a  noble  patience  under  inju- 
ries, that  temperance,  frugality,  industry, 
and  discontent  only  with  ignorance,  evil, 
and  injustice,  may  also  have  in  them  some 
element  of  heroism.  At  any  rate,  that  is 
the  lesson  which  British  imperialism  has 
been  teaching  India,  and  which  India  most 
needed  to  learn. 

Let  me  here  anticipate  the  traveled  critic 
who  has  seen  the  short,  brusque,  and  some- 
times violent  ways  of  the  British  soldier  or 
the  British  cad  with  a  native  servant  or 
coolie  or  inferior  of  whatever  class.  No- 
body who  has  been  in  India  needs  to  be  told 
that,  with  the  relations  existing  there,  such 
things  are  inevitable,  but  nobody  who 
knows  anything  about  the  facts  needs  any 
more  to  be  told  that  such  acts  are  limited 
by  an  authority  and  punished  with  an  im- 
partiality which  in  the  case  of  the  govern- 
ment of  a  conquered  people  by  the  con- 
quering nation  is  absolutely  unique.  There 
is,  in  this  connection,  if  any  one  desires  it, 
an  opportunity  for  comparison  in  the  case 
of  the  treatment  by  the  Boers  of  the  blacks 
in  South  Africa  which  has  in  it  a  whole  vol- 
ume of  meaning.  Such  wanton  cruelty, 
such  habitual  brutality,  as  are  notoriously 
characteristic  of  the  Boers'  treatment  of 
their  native  servants  have  no  more  place  in 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  INDIA  123 

India  than  the  practices  of  the  thugs  or 
dakoits;  and  the  humblest  native  in  India 
knows  that,  in  the  case  of  whatever  injustice 
he  may  experience  from  those  above  him, 
he  has  a  court  or  civil  magistrate  where  his 
appeal  will  have  a  swift  and  impartial  hear- 
ing—a court  in  part,  at  least,  of  persons  of 
his  own  race,  and  an  attorney,  if  he  chooses, 
of  his  own  speech  and  lineage. 

Indeed,  the  system  of  civil  jurisprudence 
as,  with  unexampled  wisdom  and  equity,  it 
has  been  built  up  in  India,  is  one  of  the 
most  marvelous  features  in  all  its  modern 
history.  Both  the  Hindu  and  Mohammedan 
governments,  it  must  be  remembered,  were 
pure  despotisms.  An  Indian  ruler  looked 
upon  his  kingdom  as  his  private  property, 
from  which  he  was  at  liberty  to  exact  what 
he  could  and  spend  it  as  he  pleased.  He 
could,  personally,  deprive  his  subjects  of 
liberty,  property,  or  life  itself,  as  he  saw  fit. 
One  illustration  of  this  will  suffice : 


The  Governor  Ahmadabad,  about  the  year 
1646,  invited  the  principal  directors  of  the  Eng- 
lish and  Dutch  trading  companies  to  an  enter- 
tainment, of  which,  as  usual,  displays  of  danc- 
ing-girls were  among  the  chief  features.  One 
party  having  danced  themselves  out,  another 
was  sent  for,  but  for  some  reason  they  refused 


124  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

to  come.  They  were  then  forcibly  dragged  into 
the  presence  of  the  governor.  He  listened  to 
their  excuse,  laughed  at  it,  and  immediately  com- 
manded his  guards  to  strike  off  their  heads. 
They  begged  their  lives,  but  in  vain,  and  the  exe- 
cutions were  immediately  proceeded  with  in  the 
presence  of  the  guests.  Horrified  by  the  spec- 
tacle, the  strangers  could  not  conceal  their  emo- 
tions, whereupon  the  governor  burst  out  laugh- 
ing, and  asked  them  what  it  was  that  had 
disturbed  them.1 

In  contrast  to  this  sort  of  despotism,  the 
same  writer  tells  us  that  to-day  in  India 

the  meanest  coolie  is  entitled  to  all  the  solemn 
formalities  of  a  judicial  trial;  and  the  punish- 
ment of  death,  by  whomsoever  administered  and 
on  whomsoever  inflicted,  without  the  express 
decree  of  the  law,  is  a  murder  for  which  the 
highest  officer  of  the  government  is  as  much  ac- 
countable as  a  sweeper  would  be  for  the  assas- 
sination of  the  governor-general  in  durbar.2 

In  other  words,  human  life  is  to-day  more 
secure  in  India  than  in  Kentucky. 

But  when  you  have  secured  justice,  you 
have  not  necessarily  secured  progress.  In- 
ertia may  paralyze  endeavor,  and  an  exag- 

1  "The  Indian  Empire:  A  Handbook,"  etc.,  p.  38. 
8  Ibid. 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  INDIA  125 

gerated  conservatism  successfully  resist  the 
aspirations  of  national  development.  And 
here  the  problem  in  India  was  the  more  dif- 
ficult because  the  racial  traditions  and  ten- 
dencies of  the  people  were  all  on  one  side. 
Therefore  the  quiet  determination,  the 
steady  and  undaunted  perseverance,  which 
have  overcome  these  racial  characteristics, 
which  have  awakened  a  wholesome  ambi- 
tion, developed  local  enthusiasms,  educated 
and  wisely  directed  particular  energies  and 
activities,  are  something  which  challenges 
the  warmest  admiration.  One  of  the  most 
picturesque  spots  in  India  is  Darjeeling, 
that  superb  elevation  from  which  one  gets 
the  incomparable  vision  of  the  Himalayas, 
with  the  matchless  peak  of  Everest  in  the 
far  distance.  But  quite  as  wonderful  in  its 
way  is  the  journey  thither,  over  a  railway 
that  climbs  a  height  of  six  thousand  feet 
from  the  plains  below,  surmounting  engi- 
neering difficulties,  all  the  way,  which  are 
a  wonder  to  the  traveler  and  a  perpetual 
study  to  the  civil  engineer.  And  as  one 
traces  these  successive  conquests,  he  sees 
in  them  no  inapt  symbol  of  what  the  ruling 
power  in  India  has  been  doing  all  over  the 
land:  building  its  highways,  widening  and 
deepening  its  watercourses,  fertilizing  its 
deserts,  draining  its  swamps;  the  builder 


126  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOREOW 

everywhere  of  schools  and  colleges,  hospi- 
tals and  infirmaries;  inspiring  its  agricul- 
ture, grading  and  replanting  its  forests, 
founding  and  developing  manufactories; 
and  over  all  shedding  the  light  of  a  pure 
and  undefiled  religion  in  the  midst  of  a 
people  darkened  and  besotted  by  centuries 
of  ignorance  and  superstition.  In  the  cow- 
temple  or  the  monkey-temple  at  Benares 
one  may  see  what  the  religion  of  the  Hindu 
can  do  to  touch  with  the  spell  of  a  higher 
hope  an  immortal  nature,  and  in  the  Church 
of  England  schools  at  Agra,  as  I  saw  them, 
one  may  see  what  Christianity  does  do. 

And  in  all  this  organized  effort  and  per- 
sistent endeavor  the  finest  element  is  not  the 
machinery,  admirable  as  so  often  that  is, 
but  the  man.  My  journeyings  through  the 
East  brought  me  in  many  ways  and  in 
widely  diverse  places— in  the  Straits  Set- 
tlements, in  Benares,  and  in  Arabia,  as  well 
as  in  India  itself — in  contact  with  the  Brit- 
ish official,  than  whom  there  is  no  finer 
specimen  of  public  servant  in  all  the  world. 
It  was  my  privilege,  too,  to  make  the  per- 
sonal acquaintance  of  a  large  number  of 
such  officials  from  the  highest  to  the  lowest; 
and  from  one  extreme  to  the  other,  wher- 
ever I  encountered  them,  they  were  dis- 
tinguished by  three  invariable  character- 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  INDIA  127 

istics  which  are  of  foremost  value,  I  venture 
to  think,  in  making  a  competent  public 
servant. 

1.  The  first  of  these  that  impressed  me 
was  the  sense  of  responsibility.  The 
American  traveler  who  has  had  any  ex- 
tended opportunities  for  observing  public 
servants,  in  whatever  capacity  and  of  what- 
ever nationality  other  than  his  own,  must, 
I  think,  have  been  sensible  of  this.  Our 
own  national  note  just  here  is  too  often  that 
of  flippancy,  illustrating  itself  now  by  the 
levity,  now  by  the  audacity,  with  which  a 
diplomatic  representative  will  treat  a  duty 
or  an  occasion  which  certainly  was  worthy 
of  something  more  than  either.  A  fine 
specimen  of  American  independence  and 
contempt  for  effete  rulers  has  been  cited  in 
the  anecdote  of  the  ambassador  who  is  said 
to  have  replied  to  an  Oriental  potentate 
who  sent  for  him  to  say  that  he  understood 
that  a  newspaper  in  the  United  States  had 
spoken  disrespectfully  of  the  Sultan:  "A 
newspaper  in  the  United  States  speak  dis- 
respectfully of  your  Majesty?  Why,  sir, 
there  are  twenty  thousand  newspapers  in 
the  United  States  that  give  your  Majesty 
h— 1  every  morning. ' '  But  that  such  a  style 
of  diplomatic  intercourse  could  be  seriously 
regarded  as  anything  else  than  insolent  and 


128  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

vulgar,  no  intelligent  person  will  care  seri- 
ously to  urge.  It  was,  however,  character- 
istic of  its  kind,  and  it  was  a  dramatic  illus- 
tration of  an  incapacity  to  appreciate  the 
representative  responsibility  of  a  public 
servant.  Of  the  absence  of  this  incapacity, 
public  service  in  India  is  an  impressive 
example.  Wherever  one  encountered  that 
service  it  was  marked  by  simple  dignity,  by 
a  careful  regard  for  the  accuracy  of  an 
official  statement,  by  a  painstaking  en- 
deavor that  the  demand  for  official  action 
or  intervention  should  rest  upon  the  sure 
basis  of  justice,  equity,  and  right  legal  pre- 
scription, and,  what  was  often  best  of  all, 
by  a  scrupulous,  considerate,  and  patient 
courtesy,  which  perpetually  reminded  one 
that  the  individual  had  learned  to  sink  him- 
self, his  own  swaggering  self -consciousness, 
ease,  sensitiveness,  or  preferences,  in  what 
was  due  from  him  as  the  servant  of  a  great 
state  and  the  representative  of  a  great  peo- 
ple. It  was  this  one  note  that,  wherever  one 
came  in  contact  with  a  government  official 
of  whatever  rank  or  class,  lent  to  what  he 
did  an  explicit  character  of  distinction. 

2.  And  higher  and  finer  even  than  this 
was  what,  for  want  of  any  other  term  to  de- 
scribe it,  I  may  call  the  note  of  sympathy. 
The  distance  between  an  Eastern  and  a 


IMPEESSIONS  OF  INDIA  129 

Western  mind  must  be  measured,  somebody 
has  said,  not  by  miles,  but  by  centuries. 
With  all  our  best  endeavors,  I  presume  we 
shall  never  be  quite  able,  with  our  nurture 
and  ancestry,  to  attain  the  Asiatic's  point 
of  view.  But  to  strive  to  get  nearer  to  it,  to 
be  considerate  and  patient  in  view  of  our 
remoteness  from  it,  and,  best  of  all,  forever 
to  recognize  the  common  humanity  which 
underlies  all  racial  distinctions,  and  in  the 
brotherhood  of  which  alone  we  can  hope 
to  build  the  kingdom  of  the  future,  this  is 
the  endeavor  which  India's  great  rulers, 
Hastings,  Wellesley,  Cornwallis,  the  Law- 
rences, Lord  Dalhousie,  and  their  greater 
and  lesser  compeers,  have  splendidly  and 
consistently  illustrated.  Not  long  before  I 
visited  northeastern  India,  its  mountain 
region  had  been  desolated  by  unparalleled 
storms  which  had  caused  not  only  enormous 
destruction,  but,  in  some  instances,  appal- 
ling loss  of  life.  In  connection  with  one  of 
these,  there  had  been  some  remarkable  ex- 
hibitions of  heroism  in  the  rescue  of  per- 
sons in  peril;  and  the  commissioner  of  a 
certain  district  decided  that  these  deserved 
some  formal  and  official  recognition,  and 
arranged  for  the  presentation  of  gold  med- 
als to  certain  civil  and  military  officers, 
policemen  and  others,  who  had  so  distin- 


130  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

guished  themselves.  Among  these  the  case 
of  two  natives,  coolies,  was  brought  to  his 
notice,  who  had  at  the  repeated  risk  of 
their  own  lives  and  with  rare  gallantry 
saved  the  lives  of  some  English  women  and 
children.  The  commissioner,  after  due  in- 
vestigation, decided  that  these  two  men 
were  eminently  deserving  of  the  gold  medal 
of  honor,  and  that  it  should  be  conferred 
upon  them.  But  the  presentations  were  to 
be  made  by  a  high  official  of  the  general 
government  in  a  public  hall,  in  a  town  near 
to  the  scenes  of  disaster,  and  before  a  great 
throng  of  the  foremost  people  of  the  prov- 
ince, and  beyond  the  breech-cloth  the 
coolies  had  no  clothes.  In  this  dilemma  the 
commissioner  himself,  and  at  his  own  ex- 
pense, had  them  suitably  habited,  and  they 
appeared  side  by  side  with  men  of  high 
rank,  and  received  the  decoration  which 
they  had  so  justly  won.  "And  now  they 
wear  it,"  said  a  near  kinswoman  of  the 
commissioner,  "and  wear  usually  almost 
nothing  else.  They  are  desperately  poor, 
and  rarely  earn  more  than  four  annas 
[eight  cents]  a  day."  "But  they  will  not 
keep  the  gold  medals  long,"  I  said;  "their 
poverty  will,  I  imagine,  soon  induce  them 
to  part  with  them. "  "  Never, '  'was  the  swift 
answer,  given  with  flashing  eye.  "They 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  INDIA  131 

will  never  forget  how  they  won  them  and 
who  gave  them  to  them."  And  I  believe 
her.  The  government  of  India  and  its  offi- 
cial representative  meant,  henceforth,  to 
these  men  that  which  had  made  the  hum- 
blest and  least  dowered  lives  in  all  the  land 
sharers  in  glory  and  honor  and  civic  im- 
mortality with  the  highest.  How  wise  the 
tact,  how  sure  the  insight,  how  resistless 
the  spell  of  that  human  sympathy  that  could 
here  first  discern  its  opportunity  and  then 
use  it  with  such  rare  felicity! 

3.  But  public  servants  may  have  the 
sense  of  official  responsibility  and  the  grace 
of  personal  sympathy,  and  yet  be  without 
that  chief  qualification  for  the  public  ser- 
vice which  consists  in  trained  capacity. 
And  here  has  been  the  preeminent  quality 
of  Indian  public  service  of  whatever  kind. 
The  history  of  the  Honorable  East  India 
Company's  service  was  of  another  kind. 
Then  a  "pull"  was  the  chief  requisite  to 
admission.  But  the  time  came  when  Eng- 
land learned — what  every  other  country 
that  has  undertaken  to  aolminister  foreign 
dependencies  will  have  to  learn— that 
without  a  competent  and  competently 
trained  civil  service  colonial  possessions 
are  simply  a  school  for  every  dishonesty 
and  a  screen  for  every  injustice.  No  man 


132  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

is  appointed  to  any  place  whatever  in  India 
without  a  certain  preliminary  training,  and, 
when  that  is  concluded,  the  application  of 
certain  definite  and  searching  tests  to  verify 
the  results  which  such  training  is  supposed 
to  produce.  The  only  objection  to  which 
this  system  is  open,  if  I  have  read  aright 
the  arguments  in  our  own  country  and  es- 
pecially upon  the  floor  of  Congress,  is  that 
it  is  liable  to  produce  an  official  class  or 
caste,  which  will  hold  the  public  offices  as 
a  sort  of  hereditary  possession,  passed  on 
from  one  set  of  office-holders  to  another, 
to  the  exclusion  of  that  rare  and  gifted  body 
of  men  who  are  the  tools  of  our  congress- 
men and  senators  in  primary  meetings, 
political  conventions,  and  State  legisla- 
tures, and  whose  services  can  be  properly 
rewarded  only  by  their  appointment,  on  the 
nomination  of  these  political  lights,  to  po- 
sitions for  which  they  have  never  been 
trained  and  for  which,  oftener  than  other- 
wise, they  have  not  the  remotest  qualifica- 
tion. Well,  it  would  be  interesting  if  some 
one  would  take  the  trouble  to  compare  even 
with  the  best  specimens  of  our  own  public 
servants  an  Indian  public  servant  of  the 
second  or  even  the  third  generation,  men 
whose  fathers,  like  Lord  Roberts 's,  were 
public  servants  there  themselves,  and  who, 


IMPEESSIONS  OF  INDIA  133 

in  grave  emergencies  and  in  the  long-con- 
tinued discharge  of  the  gravest  responsi- 
bilities, have  illustrated  characteristics  that 
are  so  utterly  remote  in  their  high  qualities 
of  excellence  from  our  own  patent  Con- 
gress-made article  as  to  be  to  such  a  crea- 
ture altogether  unintelligible. 

It  would  be  unjust  to  conclude  this  chap- 
ter without  recognizing  dangers  in  the  fu- 
ture of  India,  which  are  inseparable  from 
the  social  situation  in  that  part  of  the  Brit- 
ish empire,  and  which  will  need  for  their 
solution  a  large  wisdom  and,  it  may  be,  a 
still  larger  courage.  One  of  these,  it  must 
be  obvious,  is  likely  to  follow  from  that  ra- 
cial transfusion  which  almost  literally  to- 
day is  coming  to  pass  in  India.  Through 
licit  or  illicit  unions  of  the  ruling  race  with 
the  natives  there  is  now  in  India  a  consider- 
able population  of  mixed  blood,  of  which  I 
observed  little  was  said,  but  concerning 
which  one  would  think  there  must  needs  be 
on  the  part  of  reflecting  persons  consider- 
able thought.  This  element,  which  is  de- 
scribed by  the  general  term  "Eurasian," 
represents  a  community  which  has  parted 
company  with  Asiatic  traditions,  and  which 
in  manners,  dress,  and  ambitions  is  appar- 
ently altogether  identified  with  those  for- 
eigners whose  racial  inheritance  in  part  it 


134  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

shares.  From  this  class  comes  in  large 
numbers  that  element  which  is  represented 
in  India  in  civil  posts  of  minor  responsi- 
bility, in  the  preservation  of  the  public 
peace,  in  the  administration  of  railways, 
etc.  They  are  usually  found  to  be  fairly 
efficient  and  trustworthy,  and  they  are  not 
unnaturally  ambitious  of  official  place  and 
social  position  so  far  as  either  of  these  is 
within  their  reach.  Naturally,  their  only 
hope  or  expectation  in  these  directions  is 
from  their  European  connections,  as,  ob- 
viously, their  intermarriages  or  more  ir- 
regular domestic  relations  with  Europeans 
have  inevitably  cut  them  off  from  the  na- 
tive races  and  castes  of  whatever  desig- 
nation. 

At  present  this  element  in  India  is  a  dis- 
tinctly subordinate  and  inconsiderable  one ; 
but  the  causes  which  have  already  made  it 
so  evident  a  factor  in  the  problem  of  the 
future  seem  likely  to  make  it  increasingly 
so.  If  I  were  a  statesman  concerned  with 
the  future  of  India,  I  should  watch  it  closely 
and  not  without  considerable  apprehension. 
As  it  exists  at  present  it  does  not  impress 
one  as  greatly  efficient  or  formidable  in  any 
direction.  But  it  is  not  difficult  to  conceive 
that  a  time  may  come  when  native  races  in 
India,  awakening  from  their  lethargy,  may 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  INDIA  135 

address  themselves  to  the  acquisition  of  a 
modern  civilization,  and  agencies  and  in- 
struments of  revolt  or  aggression  which, 
they  now  despise ;  and  when  aware,  as  they 
already  are,  that  there  is  no  real  fellowship 
between  the  Eurasian  and  European  ele- 
ments in  India,  they  may  make  such  terms 
with  the  former  as,  appealing  to  their  cu- 
pidity or  their  ambition,  may  make  them 
formidable  allies  in  some  large  and  united 
effort  for  ridding  the  land  of  its  foreign 
rulers.  History  furnishes  just  here  paral- 
lels which  I  need  not  recall ;  and  in  the  mat- 
ter, preeminently,  of  revolutions  which  are 
both  social  and  political,  history  repeats 
itself.  To-day  the  Eurasian  in  India  be- 
lieves that  his  interests  are  \dentical  with 
those  of  its  rulers.  But  the  time  may  easily 
come  when,  weary  of  waiting  for  a  recog- 
nition which  as  yet  has  never  come,  and 
which  is  likely  to  continue  to  hold  him  at 
arm's-length,  and  itself  aloof  from  him, 
the  man  of  mixed  blood  may  turn  to  the 
people  of  that  other  blood  which  he  has  not 
been  allowed  to  forget  still  flows  in  his 
veins,  and  confederated  with  which  he  may 
one  day  prove  himself  a  potential  factor 
in  the  empire-building  of  the  future. 

There  is  still  one  other  element  in  the 
problem  of  India  which  one  cannot  over- 


136  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOKROW 

look  if  lie  would— I  mean  the  religious  ele- 
ment. The  traveler  who  has  followed  his 
guide  into  the  temples  of  Burma,  India,  and 
Ceylon  must  surely  have  brought  away 
with  him  impressions  which  time  can  never 
efface.  Some  of  them  are  pathetic,  others, 
as  at  the  Burning  Ghats  at  Benares,  are 
profoundly  tragic,  but  all  of  them,  to  any 
sensitive  mind,  are  intensely  repulsive.  It 
seems  inconceivable,  at  first,  that  any  sane 
human  being  can  find  in  rites  that  are  so 
puerile,  so  tawdry,  and  so  inane,  anything 
that  expresses  in  any  worthy  way  any  re- 
ligious idea.  It  is  in  vain  that  one  is  re- 
minded that  in  many  of  these  heathen 
temples  there  is  much  that  recalls  similar 
rites  and  instrumentalities  in  forms  of 
Christianity  that  affect  a  very  venerable 
authority  for  what  they  do.  One  can  only 
say,  so  much  the  worse  for  such  forms.  But 
the  thing  that  is  of  chief  consequence  in  the 
whole  dreary  business  is  its  profound  hold 
upon  the  faith  and  affections  of  millions  of 
people,  and  the  meager  impression  which  as 
yet  a  higher  civilization,  which  is  itself  the 
product  of  a  purer  form  of  faith,  has  made 
upon  it. 

It  is  at  this  point  that  our  popular  im- 
pression of  the  influence,  e.g.,  of  Christian 
institutions  and  especially  of  Christian 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  INDIA  137 

missions  is,  I  am  disposed  to  think,  erro- 
neous. Said  a  member  of  the  Oxford  Mis- 
sion in  Calcutta,  with  a  fine  courage  for 
which  one  could  not  sufficiently  honor  him, 
"We  had  been  here  three  years  before  we 
made  one  convert";  but  he  added,  "When 
one  remembers  what  his  departure  from  his 
old  fellowships  cost  him,  one  need  not  won- 
der." Nor,  indeed,  can  any  one  who  under- 
stands what  an  absolute  expulsion  from  all 
earlier  ties,  fellowships,  and  recognitions 
on  the  part  of  kindred  or  friends  such 
a  step  involves.  But,  on  the  other  hand, 
one  who  understands  what  has  been  going 
on  all  the  time  since  England  entered 
India  will  recognize  that  slowly  but  surely 
old  traditions  have  been  weakening  and  old 
lines  of  separation  disappearing,  so  that, 
step  by  step,  the  dawn  of  a  better  and  a 
brighter  day  is  drawing  near.  I  should  be 
violating  personal  confidences  if  I  should 
furnish  the  evidence  of  this  which  came  to 
me  in  private  conversation  with  Brahmans 
of  high  rank  and  official  station;  but  I  vio- 
late no  confidence  in  saying  that,  among  the 
most  thoughtful  and  clear-sighted  of  these, 
it  is  coming  to  be  more  and  more  clearly 
perceived  that  the  task  is  a  hopeless  one 
which  claims  to  be  able  to  hold  the  minds 
and  faith  of  a  people  who  read  and  think 


138  THE  EAST  .OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

to  the  outworn  shibboleths  of  a  corrupt  and 
sensuous  paganism.  And  meanwhile  the 
work  which  Christian  missionaries  of  many 
names  but  of  one  noble  aim  are  doing  in  all 
these  lands,  in  schools,  in  homes,  in  hospi- 
tals, in  nurseries,  in  colleges,  and  in  the 
hearts  and  lives  of  shame-bowed  and  sor- 
row-burdened men  and  women,  is  above  all 
praise,  as  it  is  above  all  price.  Much  of  the 
best  of  this  work  is  our  own.  And  herein 
and  hereby  is  the  divinest  transfusion  of 
all— the  transfusion  of  the  divinest  Life  of 
all  into  theirs  who  still  walk  in  darkness 
and  the  shadow  of  death.  May  God,  who 
has  inspired  it,  crown  it  with  complete 
success ! 


IMPRESSIONS   OF   THE   HAWAIIAN 
ISLANDS 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  HAWAIIAN 
ISLANDS 

DURING  a  recent  voyage  across  the  Pa- 
cific, our  evenings  in  the  steamer's 
fine  saloon  were  often  beguiled  by  the 
music  of  various  races  and  tongues.  A 
modern  ship's  company  has  as  little  homo- 
geneity in  nationality  as  in  interests;  and 
to  a  traveler  of  philosophic  temperament 
few  things  are  more  interesting  than  to  note 
the  ways  in  which  this  fact  at  first  betrays 
itself,  only  to  melt  away  before  a  great 
while,  if  there  be  the  opportunity  of  a  long 
voyage,  into  a  kindly  and  neighborly  tem- 
per which  enforced  proximity  makes  both 
sensible  and  mutually  agreeable.  Our 
transatlantic  racers,  it  is  true,  offer  little 
or  no  chance  for  anything  of  this  sort.  The 
voyage  is  scarcely  begun  before  it  is  ended, 
and  the  conventions  of  social  reserve,  and 
sometimes  the  memory  of  rather  painful 
experiences,  conspire  to  beget  in  the  trav- 

141 


142  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEKOW 

eler  a  habit  of  repression,  if  not  of  exclu- 
siveness.  But  in  a  long  Pacific  voyage  it  is 
different  People  who  are  destined  to  be 
two  or  three  weeks  together  in  the  same 
ship  and  at  the  same  table  sooner  or  later 
conclude  to  make  the  best  of  the  situation, 
and  one  and  all  bring  out  their  store  of 
amusements  or  accomplishments  for  the 
common  benefit. 

It  is  to  this  that  we  owed,  on  an  evening 
that  will  always  be  memorable,  the  privi- 
lege of  listening  to  some  Hawaiian  songs 
accompanied  by  a  running  commentary 
both  descriptive  and  historical,  to  which  I 
am  bound  to  say  I  am  indebted,  in  its  larger 
suggestions,  for  the  outlines  of  this  chapter. 
The  singer  and  performer— for  he  was 
both— was  an  American  gentleman  whose 
name,  if  I  were  at  liberty  to  record  it  here, 
would  be  familiar  to  many  American  ears ; 
and  he  brought  to  his  task  a  rare  and  most 
individual  charm.  He  was  born  in  Hono- 
lulu, of  an  ancestry  identified  with  the  ear- 
liest missionary  history  of  the  Sandwich 
Islands,  and  he  united  in  himself  the  fine 
insight  of  his  New  England  forefathers 
and  the  sunny  vivacity  of  Oahu.  The  in- 
strument which  he  used  was  a  primitive 
guitar  consisting  of  a  wooden  bowl  with 
metal  strings  across  its  open  face ;  the  notes 


IMPEESSIONS  OF  THE  HAWAIIAN  ISLANDS    143 

were  produced  by  a  manipulation  analo- 
gous to  that  of  a  banjo ;  and  along  with  this 
he  undertook  to  give  a  brief  history  of  the 
evolution  of  Hawaiian  music.  Some  of  us 
had  heard  it— or  thought  we  had— while  in 
the  islands,  and  had  been  much  struck  with 
both  its  plaintiveness  and  its  tunefulness. 
It  was  a  rude  shock  to  learn  that,  in  its 
primitive  and  unadulterated  form,  Ha- 
waiian music  had  neither  characteristic; 
and  that  for  the  obvious  reason  that  it 
consisted  in  thumping  the  bottom  of  the 
wooden  bowl  and  twanging  a  single  string. 
The  performer  then  illustrated  how  these 
elementary  modes  of  expressing  musical 
ideas  had  been  influenced  by  the  incom- 
ing of  civilization;  how  the  Hawaiians 
had  caught  the  airs  of  the  missionary 
hymns  and  modified  them  by  their  own  in- 
terpretation of  them;  and  finally  how,  as 
the  element  of  civilized  life  became  more 
pervasive  and  potential,  the  music  of  the 
native  and  the  manipulation  of  his  instru- 
ments took  up  into  themselves  everything— 
and  it  was  apparently  not  much— that  was 
intelligible  to  the  native  mind,  even  to  the 
last  negro  or  music-hall  melody. 

The  whole  was  a  parable  of  really  large 
suggestiveness.  For  one  could  not  but  see 
in  it  how  what  had  come  to  pass  in  connec- 


144  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

tion  with  something  that,  after  all,  was  a 
very  small  part  of  a  people 's  life,  was  that 
which  had  taken  place  in  other  and  far 
graver  aspects  of  that  life.  There  was,  in 
other  words,  first  the  primitive  simplicity 
and  barbarism  of  that  life,  with  all  its 
charm  and  all  its  dreaminess ;  and  then,  step 
by  step,  there  came  to  be,  out  of  the  mere 
babel  of  primal  instincts  and  acts,  like  pri- 
mal noises,  something  increasingly  com- 
plex, increasingly  pathetic,  and  sometimes, 
alas!  increasingly  tragic. 

For  one  cannot  read  the  story  of  the  abo- 
riginal days  of  these  beautiful  islands  with- 
out being  sensible  first  of  all  of  their  charm. 
In  their  merely  natural  aspect  this,  in  its 
almost  dramatic  contrasts,  has  a  unique  fas- 
cination. As  the  Hawaiian  Islands  rise  out 
of  the  sea  to  the  vision  of  one  who  sees  them 
for  the  first  time  from  the  deck  of  a  ship, 
their  aspect  is  both  rugged  and  august. 
The  mountain-ranges  are  distinguished  by 
great  strength  of  outline  and  boldness  of 
proportion ;  and,  as  seen  against  the  sky,  as 
we  saw  them,  with  the  moon  rising  behind 
them,  have  in  them  something  indescriba- 
bly mysterious  and  noble.  But  as  they  are 
more  nearly  approached,  they  are  seen  to 
be  clothed  almost  to  their  summits  with  a 
rich  verdure,  and  this  has  a  singularly  gra- 
cious quality  of  softness  and  depth. 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  HAWAIIAN  ISLANDS    145 

This  feature  in  the  landscape  seems 
somehow  typical  of  the  people.  Their  his- 
tory reveals  them  as  distinguished  by  char- 
acteristics of  great  savagery  and  cruelty; 
but  their  ordinary  aspect,  and  their  un- 
spoiled manner  toward  strangers,  where  it 
still  survives,  is  one  of  an  individual  and 
most  unusual  charm.  No  one  who  has  seen 
them  will  find  himself  tempted  to  compare 
them  to  any  other  people  or  race.  Wher- 
ever they  derived  the  traits  of  form  and 
feature  that  distinguish  them,— and  their 
racial  origin  is  hidden  in  considerable  ob- 
scurity,— they  do  not  resemble  the  races  or 
people  from  whom  they  are  supposed  to  be 
sprung.  The  race  found  by  the  first  ex- 
plorer, Juan  de  Gatan,  commander  of  the 
Spanish  exploring  expeditions  sent  out 
when  the  ships  of  Spain  dominated  the 
waters  of  the  Pacific,  was  Polynesian;  but 
it  has  not  been  claimed  that  any  other  Poly- 
nesians closely  resembled  them.  It  is  un- 
doubtedly the  case  that,  during  their  long 
occupancy  of  the  beautiful  islands  in  which 
they  found  their  home,  they  underwent 
those  changes  which,  as  Buckle  in  his  ' l  His- 
tory of  Civilization"  has  shown,  are  as  in- 
evitable as  the  effect  of  climatic  and  kin- 
dred influences.  In  a  latitude  in  which  the 
range  of  the  thermometer,  all  the  year 
round,  is  ordinarily  between  75°  and  85° 


146  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

F.,  it  is  not  probable  that  great  robustness 
or  aggressive  vigor  would  be  developed; 
and  it  has  not  been.  On  the  other  hand,  in 
a  region  singularly  favorable  to  the  develop- 
ment of  almost  every  variety  of  tropical  and 
semi-tropical  fruits  and  flowers,  without  the 
arid  and  desolating  influence  of  long 
droughts,  it  was  equally  to  be  expected  that 
this  rare  beauty  and  affluence  in  every  nat- 
ural environment  should  find  its  reflec- 
tion in  the  singular  softness,  grace,  and 
beauty  of  the  people.  The  mountains  make 
them  strong  and  stalwart,— their  height, 
grace,  and  symmetry  of  physical  develop- 
ment are  especially  noteworthy, — and  their 
plains,  fertile,  flowery,  and  ever  verdant, 
make  them  soft  and  indolent  and  self- 
indulgent.  No  stranger  can  see  them  for 
the  first  time,  disfigured  as  they  now  too 
often  are  by  the  hideous  costumes  of  our 
modern  civilization,  without  being  dazzled 
sometimes  by  a  beauty  of  form  and  feature 
and  of  expression  which,  to  an  artist's  eye, 
when  they  are  seen  in  their  own  lovely  set- 
ting, is  a  perpetual  delight.  *  *  Here, ' '  such 
a  one  would  be  tempted  to  say,  "is  some- 
thing like  the  original  Garden  of  Eden,  as 
it  might  have  been." 

Yet  the  earlier  and  tribal  history  of  the 
people  was  neither  beautiful  nor  engaging. 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  HAWAIIAN  ISLANDS    147 

In  the  Bishop  Museum  in  Honolulu,  a  foun- 
dation which  owes  its  existence  to  the  wise 
munificence  of  a  Hawaiian  princess  who 
was,  at  the  time  of  her  death,  the  wife  of  an 
American  merchant  in  Honolulu,  we  may 
see  not  alone  the  emblems  and  implements 
of  domestic  life,  but  those  others  which  in 
the  history  of  the  most  primitive  peoples 
are  the  symbols  of  its  religion.  Along  with 
these  one  may  read,  too,  if  his  curiosity 
leads  him  in  such  a  direction,  the  story  of 
that  strange  admixture  of  grotesque  be- 
liefs, rites,  and  priestly  terrorism  which 
repeats  a  story  that,  alas !  in  the  history  of 
the  world's  religions,  is  as  old  as  the  race. 
Two  elements  go,  ordinarily,  to  make  up 
these  religions,  and  they  were  not  wanting 
in  the  Hawaiian  Islands.  One  of  them  has 
been  superstition,  a  blind  terror  begot- 
ten by  persistent  misinterpretation  of  the 
forces  of  nature,  with  its  invariable  accom- 
paniment of  a  belief  in  the  power  of  evil 
spirits  in  earth  and  air  and  sky;  and  the 
other  the  cleverness  of  unscrupulous  men 
who,  as  priests  or  religious  teachers,  per- 
petuated among  the  people  a  blind  fear, 
which  by  the  adroit  manipulation  of  charms 
and  amulets,  and,  above  all,  by  the  mysteri- 
ous influence  of  the  taboo,  they  maintained 
and  deepened.  We  are  accustomed  to  as- 


148   THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

sociate  that  word  " taboo"  with  the  idea  of 
prohibition;  but,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  it 
stood  for  a  whole  code  of  religious  rites, 
ceremonies,  and  privileges,  as  well  as  re- 
strictions, which  covered  every  man's  life, 
reached  out  to  and  controlled  the  disposi- 
tion of  his  goods,  appropriated  to  so-called 
religious  uses,  if  it  saw  fit,  the  products  of 
his  fields  and  fishing-grounds,  and,  in  its 
extreme  form,  when  it  became  a  part  of  the 
worship  of  the  people,  sent  the  king  for 
days  and  nights  to  the  temple  in  a  continu- 
ous act  of  worship,  while  the  altars  reared 
under  the  trees  reeked  with  the  blood  of 
human  sacrifices.  It  was  characteristic  of 
a  note  of  singular  brutality  in  the  religion 
of  these  island  peoples  that,  in  a  silence 
which,  if  it  could,  muzzled  the  mouth  of 
every  man,  woman,  and  child,  beast  and 
fowl,  the  priest  killed  a  hog,  and  then  put 
to  death  a  man.  The  hog  was  then  roasted 
and  eaten,  and  the  people  returned  thanks 
after  the  feast  by  putting  to  death  another 
man! 

Such  conceptions  and  usages  prepare  one 
to  find  among  a  people  whose  they  are  a 
morality  of  the  very  lowest  type ;  and  of  the 
unnamable  vices  of  a  race  with  singularly 
engaging  traits  of  disposition  I  may  not 
speak  here.  They  are  a  tragic  commentary 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  HAWAIIAN  ISLANDS    149 

upon  the  theory  that  heathen  peoples,  so  far 
as  their  religion  is  concerned,  may  wisely 
be  left  to  themselves,  and  that  efforts  to 
better  them  lead  them  only  to  exchange 
one  set  of  vices  for  another;  and  are,  inci- 
dentally, a  no  less  interesting  commentary 
upon  the  relative  value  of  religious  cere- 
monial, and  of  those  great  informing  and 
inspiring  principles  which  touch  the 
springs  of  conduct  rather  than  direct  the 
rules  and  instruments  of  worship.  A 
stranger  who  had  landed  in  one  of  the  Ha- 
waiian Islands  when  they  were  as  yet  un- 
trodden by  the  white  man  might  easily  have 
formed  a  conception  of  them  as  an  ex- 
tremely devout  people.  They  never  built 
a  canoe  or  used  a  new  fishing-rod  without 
offering  a  prayer  and  making  a  sacrifice 
to  their  patron  god.  Much  more,  if  a  house 
were  to  be  built  or  a  boat  to  be  launched, 
was  the  priest  invoked  and  the  sacrifice 
offered.  But  in  pathetic  contrast  with  such 
usages  was  the  fact  that  those  two  most 
august  facts  of  life,  as  we  view  it,  marriage 
and  death,  were  unattended  with  any  reli- 
gious ceremonial  whatever.  And  in  this 
striking  departure  from  the  custom  of  other 
pagan  peoples  we  have  a  very  impressive 
demonstration  of  the  essential  animalism  of 
the  people. 


150  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOREOW 

In  the  most  picturesque   of  the   many 
interesting    collections    assembled    in    the 
Bishop  Museum  at  Honolulu  are  specimens 
of  the   superb  plumed   spears   and  robes 
worn  by  the  chieftains  and  sovereigns  of 
the  Hawaiian  tribes.    One  of  them  is  a  mag- 
nificent canary-colored  vestment  made  of 
feathers  of  inimitable  richness   and  deli- 
cacy, and  behind  these  are  seen  the  vari- 
ous insignia  which  denoted  the  rank  and 
achievements    of    these   hereditary    chief- 
tains, one  of  whom  became  in  time  their 
king.    For  here,  as  so  often  elsewhere,  the 
political  evolution  seems  to  have  been  from 
an  association  of  heads  of  tribes  who  be- 
came  in   time   vassals   to   one   who   was 
stronger  and  cleverer  than  the  rest.     The 
Hawaiian  chiefs  found  their  master,  after 
long  periods  of  warfare  with  one  another, 
in  that  powerful  ruler  of  the  island  of  Ha- 
waii who,  having  first  conquered  the  whole 
of  his  own  island,  pushed  his  victories  over 
the    other   islands,    and    demonstrated    in 
many  ways  the  qualities  of  a  really  great 
sovereign.      His    statue   has   wisely    been 
placed  in  front  of  the  Government  Building 
in  Honolulu,  and  no  one  who  looks  at  it  will 
refuse  to  own  that  its  original  was  justly 
called  * '  Kamehameha  the  Great. ' '    To  this 
man,  wise,  strong,  and  courageous,  his  peo- 


IMPRESSIONS  OP  THE  HAWAIIAN  ISLANDS    151 

pie  owe  a  lasting  debt ;  and  under  his  hand 
there  came  to  them,  for  the  first  time,  the 
enjoyment  of  those  individual  rights  which 
under  a  feudal  government  are  unknown. 
How  welcome  they  must  have  been,  we  can 
realize  only  when  we  contrast  the  original 
condition  of  such  a  primitive  people  with 
our  own.  The  artist,  the  poet,  the  senti- 
mental traveler,  are  fond  of  reminding  us 
how  much  of  the  world 's  earlier  beauty  and 
simplicity  civilization  in  its  advance  has 
spoiled.  Yes,  it  may  be  so,  from  a  super- 
ficial point  of  view;  but  how  would  our 
artistic  or  sentimental  friends  have  enjoyed 
a  condition  of  things  in  which,  when  their 
own  feudal  chief  went  abroad,  they  and 
their  families  were  obliged  to  be  prostrate 
on  the  ground  face  downward,  and  where 
it  was  death  for  a  common  man  to  remain 
standing  at  the  mention  of  the  king 's  name, 
or  when  his  sovereign's  old  coat  was  car- 
ried by?  Civilization,  when  it  enables  a 
man  to  call  not  only  his  soul,  but,  when  the 
tax-gatherer  is  done  with  it,  his  property 
his  own,  has  ill-educated  us  to  appreciate 
the  condition  of  a  people  among  whom  two 
thirds  of  all  that  they  produced  was  the 
property  of  the  chiefs,  big  and  little,  who 
ruled  over  them.  We  may  be  reverting  to 
such  a  type  as  this  in  our  great  cities,  with 


152     THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

their  greater  imposts,  but  happily  we  have 
not  gotten  there  yet. 

This  leads  me  naturally  to  the  next  and, 
to  many  minds,  more  interesting  period  in 
Hawaiian  history  when  its  peaceful  seclu- 
sion was  at  length  invaded  by  alien  influ- 
ences which,  in  a  comparatively  short  time, 
have  largely  changed  its  aspect  and  pros- 
pects. The  first  intrusion,  as  we  have  seen, 
was  Spanish,  but  it  was  speedily  followed 
by  the  visit  of  Captain  Cook  in  1778,  and 
later  by  that  of  Vancouver.  Cook  ac- 
counted himself  the  discoverer  of  the  Ha- 
waiian Islands,  and  as  a  compliment  to  an 
English  peer  who  was  at  that  time  First 
Lord  of  the  Admiralty,  gave  them  the 
name  by  which  school-boys  have  oftenest 
known  them,  the  Sandwich  Islands. 

The  sentimental  moralist  who  has 
reached  this  point  in  the  history  of  newly 
discovered  territory  has,  as  I  have  inti- 
mated, a  tempting  opportunity  for  raising 
the  question  how  far  civilization  has  really 
elevated  the  character  of  the  savage.  In 
the  case  of  the  Hawaiian  Islands  there  is 
a  great  deal  that  lends  itself  to  such  a  dis- 
cussion in  the  painful  history  of  civilized 
commercial  invasion,  and  the  most  repul- 
sive features  of  this  are  to  be  found  in  con- 
nection with  both  the  naval  and  commercial 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  HAWAIIAN  ISLANDS    153 

marine  of  the  nations  that,  from  their  re- 
discovery by  Cook,  sought  a  foothold  in 
these  gems  of  the  Pacific.  I  need  not  re- 
hearse that  history  here.  It  has,  alas!  its 
familiar  counterpart  all  around  the  world; 
but  it  has  also  this  honorable  sequence,  that 
there  was  speedily  awakened  in  many 
American  hearts  the  purpose  to  give  to  the 
Hawaiian  Islands  that  strong  foundation  of 
Christian  morality  which  can  alone  make 
either  a  community  or  a  nation  enduringly 
great. 

I  may  not  trace  here  the  history  of  Chris- 
tian missions  in  the  Sandwich  Islands,  but 
I  may  at  least  say,  as  one  wholly  outside  of 
the  communions  by  which  originally  they 
were  initiated  and  conducted,  that  no  one 
can  visit  these  islands  without  recognizing 
the  noble  work  which  Christian  missiona- 
ries have  done  there.  By  a  curious  confu- 
sion, a  habit  of  jesting  allusion  to  the  "sons 
of  missionaries"  in  the  Hawaiian  Islands 
has,  in  many  minds,  been  associated  with 
the  missionaries  themselves,  and  perhaps 
it  may  be  worth  while  for  an  outsider  to 
say  how  much  in  his  judgment  it  amounts 
to.  I  suppose  that  in  Honolulu,  as  else- 
where, the  sons  of  missionaries  have  turned 
to  secular  callings,  and  I  presume  they  have 
conducted  themselves  with  shrewdness  and 


154  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

• 

success.     It  is   difficult  to   see  why  they 
should  not  have  done  so ;  and  if  a  mission- 
ary's  residence  in  the  Hawaiian  Islands 
gave  his  son  a  business  advantage  there,  it 
would  seem  natural  enough  that  he  should 
have  embraced  it.    I  have  heard  in  other 
foreign  fields  bitter  words  about  the  mis- 
sionaries,   and   in   one   instance   took   the 
trouble    to    follow   these    complaints    and 
sneers  to  their  source.     It  was  said  that 
missionaries  took  advantage  of  opportuni- 
ties to  push  their  way  into  business  agen- 
cies, and  so  to  crowd  out  men  whose  liveli- 
hood these  agencies  were.     On  inquiry  I 
found  that  the  whole  basis  for  these  whole- 
sale charges  was  that  one  missionary  in  a 
foreign  land  who  had  lost  his  voice  there 
had  turned  to  a  secular  task  which  was 
offered  to  him,  and  which  it  was  found  that 
he  could  do  better  than  the  man  who  stood 
next  to  him  in  competition  for  it ;  and  that 
was  all  there  was  to  it.    Under  such  circum- 
stances, the  whole  superstructure  of  mis- 
representation crumbled  to  the  ill-smelling 
fragments   of   business   jealousy.     In   the 
same  way  I  found,  on  inquiry  in  Honolulu, 
that  a  good  deal  of  the  bitterness  against 
missionaries  had  to  do  with  their  coura- 
geous witness  against  the  glaring  immorali- 
ties of  their  own  race.     They  have  been 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  HAWAIIAN  ISLANDS    155 

contemptuously  described  as,  there  and 
elsewhere,  living  in  luxury  and  indolence, 
and  their  homes  as  illustrating  what,  to  the 
natives  among  whom  they  labored,  was  a 
prodigal  expenditure.  Well,  yes,  when  one 
is  living  among  a  community  whose  ward- 
robe consists  of  a  bit  of  cotton  cloth,  and 
their  daily  menu  a  bowl  of  rice  or  taro,  a 
rocking-chair  and  a  pair  of  cotton  sheets 
may  seem  bloated  self-indulgence;  but  the 
question  whether  a  civilized  human  being  is 
called,  in  order  to  do  missionary  work,  to 
accept  barbarian  standards  of  decency  or 
modest  comfort  would  still  remain  to  be 
answered. 

A  much  more  interesting  and  more  im- 
portant question,  whether  in  the  Hawaiian 
Islands  or  anywhere  else,  is  the  question, 
What  was  the  influence  of  these  Christian 
missionaries  and  those  who  came  after  them 
upon  the  manners,  habits,  beliefs,  and 
ideals  of  the  people  to  whom  they  came? 
At  the  base  of  the  state,  it  forever  needs 
to  be  remembered  there  is  the  family;  and 
the  first  thing  that  Christian  households, 
largely  drawn  from  New  England  ances- 
tries, spoke  to  was,  so  far  as  it  existed  at 
all,  the  Hawaiian  conception  of  the  family. 
We  were  shown  in  the  streets  of  Honolulu 
a  wooden  house  which  had  been  made  in 


156  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

New  England  and  shipped  piecemeal  to  its 
destination.  It  was  as  delightful  a  bit  of 
incongruity  as  could  be  imagined,  with  its 
two  stories,  white  clapboards,  green  blinds, 
narrow  windows,  low  ceilings,  and  the  rest. 
One  perspired  at  the  thought  of  the  suffer- 
ings of  those  who  had  summered  in  that 
hot  second  story,  and  wondered  at  the  per- 
sistence of  provincial  type  that  could  have 
done  so  stupid  a  thing.  But  also  one  could 
not  but  straightway  remember  how  much 
else  that  was  fine  and  high  had  persisted 
along  with  it,  how  much  patient  courage 
and  steadfast  self-sacrifice  had  gone  to  the 
acquirement  of  the  heathen  speech,  had 
wrought  with  the  pagan  mothers  and  chil- 
dren, and  day  by  day  had  held  up  before 
that  wild  and  lawless  savagery  the  pure 
and  strenuous  examples  of  gentleness  and 
godliness  and  unswerving  devotion  to  duty. 
That  that  large  expenditure  of  labor  and 
money  has  produced  in  the  Hawaiian  Isl- 
ands enduring  results,  no  one  who  knows 
them  will  pretend  to  question. 

But  along  with  them  there  were  coming 
to  pass  political  changes  of  equal  and  last- 
ing import.  I  have  spoken  of  Kamehameha 
I,  whose  statue  stands  in  front  of  the  Gov- 
ernment Building  in  Honolulu,  and  whose 
noble  presence  proclaims  him  every  inch  a 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  HAWAIIAN  ISLANDS   157 

king.  It  is  not  easy  to  imagine  what  would 
have  been  the  fate  of  civilization  in  the  Ha- 
waiian Islands  if  this  sovereign  and  his 
vassals  had  antagonized  it.  But  the  king, 
if  not  the  feudal  chiefs,  had  the  rare  dis- 
cernment to  see  how  much  of  order,  secu- 
rity, and  prosperity  the  white  man  could 
give  to  his  people,  and  to  welcome  changes 
from  an  arbitrary  paternalism,  which  ri- 
pened under  his  successors  into  something 
like  a  constitutional  form  of  government 
with  definite  land  tenures,  the  dethrone- 
ment of  the  heathen  priests,  and,  under 
Kamehameha  III,  in  1833,  the  proclamation 
of  a  bill  of  rights,  and  the  creation,  a  few 
years  later,  of  an  executive  ministry,  a  ju- 
diciary department,  and  the  promulgation 
of  a  constitution.  In  other  words,  a  race  of 
savages  gradually  organized  itself  into  a 
state ;  and,  in  the  whole  process  of  organi- 
zation, it  is  but  just  to  say  that  our  own  in- 
stitutions and  our  own  progress  and  devel- 
opment under  them  exercised  a  paramount 
influence. 

But,  alas!  you  cannot  make  a  state  by  a 
constitution,  and  our  own  times  have  had  no 
more  dramatic  illustration  of  this  than  the 
Hawaiian  Islands.  That  able  ruler,  Kame- 
hameha I,  who  had  the  wisdom  to  discern 
that  the  foreign  peoples  who  had  found 


158  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOREOW 

their  way  to  his  shores  were  the  product  of 
institutions  which  he  and  his  might  wisely 
borrow,  was  followed  by  successors,  male 
and  female,  who  had  neither  his  prudence, 
his  principles,  nor  his  genius  for  statesman- 
ship. There  were  five  Hawaiian  rulers  in 
the  Kamehameha  succession,  but  when,  in 
1874,  Kamehameha  V,  the  last  of  that  dy- 
nasty, died,  the  situation  became  gravely 
complicated.  There  was,  as  I  have  indi- 
cated, a  legislative  body,  and  this,  after 
much  delay,  proceeded  to  the  election  of 
David  Kalakaua,  who  received  the  suf- 
frages of  a  considerable  number  of  his  own 
countrymen,  but  especially  of  the  Ameri- 
can residents.  Opposed  to  him,  however, 
was  Queen  Emma,  of  late  years  so  familiar 
a  figure  in  Hawaiian  history,  the  widow  of 
Kamehameha  IV.  Queen  Emma  was  the 
representative  of  the  anti- American  senti- 
ment in  the  island,  and  besides  the  consid- 
erable British  sympathy  which  ranged 
itself  on  her  side,  she  had  a  large  following 
of  various  nationalities  and  of  not  very 
fragrant  record.  In  a  word,  the  lines  were 
drawn  and  the  battle  set  in  array  for  that 
long  struggle,  the  latest  issue  of  which  re- 
sulted so  recently  in  the  annexation  to  our 
own  Republic  of  what  was  not  long  before 
the  kingdom  of  Hawaii. 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  HAWAIIAN  ISLANDS   169 

I  may  not  trace  the  history  of  that  strug- 
gle here,  but  I  may  perhaps  be  permitted  to 
state  the  conclusions  which  I  think  almost 
any  dispassionate  student  of  history  must 
inevitably  reach  in  regard  to  it. 

In  the  first  place,  it  is  important  that  the 
materials  out  of  which  this  new  state  had 
inevitably  to  be  made  must  be  clearly  recog- 
nized.   There  were,  to  begin  with,  the  na- 
tive   populations.      Their    characteristics 
have  already  been  in  some  measure  indi- 
cated, and  these,  it  is  to  be  remembered, 
have  not  at  any  time  revealed  any  consid- 
erable substantiveness  of  character.     The 
native   Hawaiian   was   kindly,   but  cruel; 
graceful,  but  essentially  savage ;  and  super- 
stitious to  an  almost  incredible  degree.    It 
has  been  charged  that  when  the  people  re- 
ceived  Christianity   they   gave   a  cordial 
welcome  to  both  its  teachers  and  its  teach- 
ings; but  I  apprehend  that  there  can  be 
little  doubt  that  both  pagan  beliefs  and 
superstitious  practices  still  survive  in  what 
are  reckoned  as  Christian  households.    An 
intelligent  observer  to  whom  I  am  much 
indebted,  Captain  Lucien  Young,  U.  S.  N.,1 
says:  "The  idols  have  been  destroyed  or 
hid  away,  but  in  secret  haunts,  concealed 
from  the  public  gaze,  the  natives  practise 

The  Real  Hawaii,''  p.  73,  passim. 


160  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

their  incantations  and  believe  in  the  mys- 
teries of  their  time-honored  religion." 
When  it  is  remembered  that  many  of  these 
are  most  intimately  associated  with  their 
usages  as  to  alleviating  pain  or  healing  or 
warding  off  disease,  it  can  readily  be  seen 
how  difficult  it  has  been  to  uproot  them. 
The  physician  attached  to  a  Christian  mis- 
sion or  civilized  community  in  those  islands, 
when  called  to  the  bedside  of  a  native  pa- 
tient, has  had  to  battle  not  only  with  the 
disease,  but  with  the  persistent  faith,  if  not 
of  the  patient,  then  of  his  whole  household 
and  all  his  neighbors,  in  a  science  of  medi- 
cine which  consisted  in  propitiating  some 
offended  deity  by  the  sacrifice  of  a  pig,  and 
sometimes  (as  late  as  1820)  by  the  sacrifice 
of  a  child.  Nor  does  this  seem  surprising 
when  one  comes  to  understand  the  charac- 
ters of  the  gods,  who,  as  conceived  by  their 
worshipers,  were  certainly  embodiments  of 
cruelty  and  bestiality.  No  description  of 
the  rites  of  worship  which  the  first  visitors 
to  these  islands  found  there  could  be  ad- 
mitted to  the  pages  of  a  decent  publication ; 
yet  long  after  the  earlier  rule  of  savage 
chieftains  had  been  superseded  by  consti- 
tutional forms  of  government,  some  of  these 
survived  in  the  royal  household;  and  a 
queen  who  professed  to  have  unreservedly 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  HAWAIIAN  ISLANDS    161 

accepted  the  Christian  religion  kept  about 
her  the  kahunas,  or  priests  and  heathen 
doctors,  as  her  closest  friends  and  advisers. 
With  this  background  of  unredeemed 
heathenism  to  build  upon,  it  was  not  more 
natural  that  it  should  reappear  under  new 
forms  of  civic  order  than  that  these,  in  turn, 
should  be  made  the  opportunity  for  every 
unscrupulous  adventurer  who  had  the  auda- 
city to  ingratiate  himself  with  this  simple 
people  or  to  lend  his  cleverness  to  the  tur- 
bulent or  revolutionary  tendencies  which 
from  time  to  time  appeared  among  them. 
The  American  residents  and  others  who,  in 
1875,  elected  Kalakaua  as  king,  chose,  I 
suppose,  the  best  available  man ;  but  he  was 
not  even  a  pure  Hawaiian,  being  reputed  to 
be  the  illegitimate  son  of  a  negro  cobbler 
who  came  to  the  Sandwich  Islands,  no  one 
seems  to  know  on  what  errand,  from  our 
own  Boston!  This  certainly  was  pretty 
poor  stuff  out  of  which  to  have  made  a  king, 
and  it  throws  an  interesting  light,  inciden- 
tally, upon  the  sometime  struggles  of  our 
Anglican  brethren  to  maintain  in  the  isl- 
ands an  " ancient  dynasty"!  But  I  refer 
to  it  now  because  it  helps  to  explain  what, 
in  the  subsequent  history  of  the  govern- 
ment, came  to  be  such  a  curious  and  con- 
stantly recurring  characteristic  of  the  suc- 
11 


162  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOKROW 

cessive  cabinets,  administrations,  and  the 
like.  Kalakaua's  chief  counselor  and 
mentor  was  an  ex-Mormon  missionary  of 
such  unsavory  character  that  his  own  com- 
munity had  expelled  him— one  who,  after 
having  swindled  his  Mormon  associates 
and  apostatized  from  them,  fled  to  Honolulu 
and  devoted  himself  to  inflaming  the  na- 
tives against  the  whites.  This  man  stands 
foremost  in  a  long  series  of  disreputable 
men,  Americans,  Englishmen,  and  of  what- 
ever other  vagrant  race  that  drifted  into 
the  islands,  who  in  any  political  crisis  came 
to  the  surface,  always  as  fomenters  of  dis- 
cord, friends  of  unbridled  license,  and 
leaders  of  every  vicious  element  in  the 
community.  In  reaching  a  conclusion  as  to 
what  was  our  duty  as  a  nation  to  these  peo- 
ple, it  is  impossible  to  leave  out  of  sight 
such  obvious  considerations  as  those  facts 
which  I  have  rehearsed  suggest.  I  am  not 
a  disciple  of  a  policy  of  imperialism,  but  I 
confess,  in  view  of  the  situation  as  it  existed 
in  the  Hawaiian  Islands  when  they  voted 
to  seek  annexation  to  the  United  States,  I 
am  unable  to  see  what  else  we  could  have 
done  than  to  grant  their  request. 

For  their  position  in  the  Pacific  indicated 
that  if  they  are  not  strong  enough  to  rule 
themselves,  they  belong  rightfully  under 


that  protection  which  we,  of  all  other  peo- 
ples, can  best  give  them.  Whatever  earlier 
civilization,  Spanish,  English,  or  French, 
found  them,  seized  them,  or  sought  to  en- 
rich itself  from  them,  we  alone  earliest 
recognized  a  duty  to  them,  and  sought,  by 
bringing  to  bear  upon  them  the  highest  and 
most  transforming  influences,  to  discharge 
it.  We  alone  strove  to  build  up  among  them 
a  civilization  which  had  for  its  foundation 
some  other  motive  than  the  passion  of  con- 
quest or  the  love  of  gain.  We  alone  gave 
them  schools  and  teachers,  and  the  good 
physician  with  the  Christian  home.  We 
alone  enriched  them  with  those  who,  what- 
ever may  be  said  of  their  descendants,  lived 
pure  and  noble  lives,  and  did  among  them 
good  and  lasting  work.  After  these,  it  is 
true,  have  come  the  trader,  the  land-specu- 
lator, the  sugar-planter,  and  the  rest;  and 
possibly  it  may  be  as  well  that  the  authority 
of  the  United  States  should  stay  in  the  Ha- 
waiian Islands  to  regulate  them,  as  well  as 
to  protect  its  own  international  rights. 

International  rights,  I  say,  for  as  to  the 
growing  importance  of  these  there  can  be 
no  smallest  doubt.  One  need  not  be  dazzled 
or  blinded  by  the  glamour  of  imperial  ex- 
pansion in  order  to  recognize  that  no  re- 
public such  as  ours  can  draw  a  line  round 


164  THE  EAST  OP  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEROW 

its  domestic  territory  and  ignore  its  duties 
and  its  opportunities  with  reference  to  the 
rest  of  the  world.  We  must  trade  with 
other  countries  than  our  own;  and  if  we 
have  anything  good  that  they  have  not,  we 
must  needs  wish,  and,  even  though  there 
should  be  pecuniary  profit  in  it,  may  rightly 
wish,  to  impart  it  to  them.  But  we  cannot 
do  this  unless  we  can  get  at  them,  and  we 
cannot  get  at  them  without  the  physical  re- 
sources and  conveniences  which  shall  ena- 
ble us  to  do  so.  Now,  the  Hawaiian  Isl- 
ands stand  preeminently  for  one  of  these 
conveniences.  No  traffic  with  the  great 
East  can  be  maintained,  except  at  almost 
ruinous  cost,  without  some  foothold  between 
its  coasts  and  ours  for  a  Pacific  coaling- 
station,  and  no  greater  opportunity  for  the 
enlargement  of  certain  departments  of  agri- 
culture and  trade  than  the  Hawaiian  Isl- 
ands afford  could  easily  be  discovered. 
If  we  do  our  duty  toward  them,  we  shall 
find  our  interest  in  doing  it,  and  to  that  duty 
and  to  those  toward  whom  we  are  to  dis- 
charge it  there  is  no  great  world-power  that 
is  so  near  as  we.  Geographical,  commer- 
cial, and  moral  considerations  here  seem  all 
to  point  one  way. 

But,  alas !  it  would  seem  as  if  the  people 
toward  whom  we  are  to  discharge  such  duty 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  HAWAIIAN  ISLANDS    165 

would  soon  cease  to  be.  There  is  one  mys- 
terious effect  of  civilization  upon  weaker 
races  concerning  which  the  historian  and 
the  psychologist  have  yet  to  give  us  more 
light.  The  United  States,  since  its  people 
first  went  to  the  Sandwich  Islands,  has  car- 
ried on  no  exterminating  war.  With  shame 
and  confusion  it  must  be  owned  that  it  has 
taught  them  many  vices,  or  rather  perhaps 
it  would  be  more  true  to  say  it  has  cor- 
rupted them  with  the  taint  of  forms  of  those 
vices  which  were  distinctly  its  own.  But, 
on  the  other  hand,  it  has  given  them  the 
arts,  and  learning,  and  civic  order,  and  the 
examples  of  industry  and  thrift.  But  it 
cannot  be  said  that  they  have  prized  the 
learning  highly  or  widely  profited  by  it. 
For  no  reason  which  can  be  directly  trace- 
able to  us,  it  must  be  owned  that  they  are  a 
decaying  race,  and  their  more  recent  statis- 
tics reveal  this  with  dramatic  significance. 
According  to  Captain  Young,1  whom  I  have 
already  quoted,  the  eight  islands  composing 
the  Hawaiian  group  have  a  total  population 
of  107,000,  of  which,  however,  only  35,000 
are  Hawaiians.  There  are  10,000  people 
of  mixed  descent,  in  part  Hawaiian;  the 
rest  are  Chinese,  Japanese,  Portuguese, 
and  other  Europeans,  of  which  last,  with 

i  "  The  New  Hawaii,"  p.  327. 


166   THE  EAST  OP  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOKROW 

Americans,  there  are  14,000.  In  other 
words,  nearly  two  thirds  of  the  people  of 
these  islands  are  other  than  Hawaiian. 
That  this  proportion  is  likely  to  be  in- 
creased along  the  same  line  seems  probable, 
and  the  time  seems  likely  to  come  when  the 
native  Hawaiian,  like  the  native  North 
American  Indian,  will  have  disappeared. 
Who  they  are  who  will  ultimately  be 
dominant  in  his  place  it  is  not  easy  to  fore- 
cast. At  any  moment  the  United  States 
may  close  its  Hawaiian  doors  to  those  races 
which,  of  the  Eastern  world,  are  nearest  to 
the  islands,  and  which  are  now  represented 
there  by  a  large  proportion  of  the  popula- 
tion— some  twenty-four  thousand  Japanese 
and  fifteen  thousand  Chinese,  who  to-day, 
in  fact,  taken  together,  make  an  element 
larger  than  that  represented  by  the  Ha- 
waiians  themselves  or  any  other  peoples. 
Both  these  races  have  brought  to  the  Ha- 
waiian Islands  forces  and  qualities  which, 
originally,  were  foreign  to  the  native  peo- 
ple. As  the  eye  ranges  the  distant  hill- 
sides which  flank  the  rear  of  Honolulu,  it 
is  arrested  by  the  shining  patches  of 
ordered  verdure  which,  terrace  upon  ter- 
race, climb  up  along  their  slopes;  and  the 
inquirer  is  told,  in  every  instance,  that  these 


IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  HAWAIIAN  ISLANDS    167 

are  the  farms  and  market-gardens  of  the 
Japanese,  who  have  in  so  many  like  places 
taught  the  soil  to  yield  its  increase  where 
it  never  did  before.  Such  qualities,  in  any 
people,  are  sources  of  power  and  wealth; 
and  when  it  is  remembered  that  behind  the 
Japanese  have  come  the  Chinese,  whose 
thrift  in  the  Eastern  world  is  a  proverb 
like  that  of  the  French  or  Germans  in  the 
Western,  it  is  plain  that  their  influence 
upon  the  future  of  the  Hawaiian  Islands 
must  be  deep  and  lasting.  Already,  in  the 
case  of  the  Chinese,  has  their  capacity  for 
agricultural  work  revealed  itself  in  the  vast 
sugar-plantations  which  American  and 
other  capital  has  acquired  and  is  adminis- 
tering with  characteristic  skill  and  profit; 
and  already  there  are  tokens  of  the  wealth 
which,  aided  by  this  foreign  labor,  these 
can  extract  from  a  rich  soil  and  from  singu- 
larly favorable  climatic  conditions. 

So  the  problem  is  set:  the  mixture  of 
races,  energies,  industries,  and  of  the 
higher  moral  qualities  which  these  various 
strains,  ancestries,  and  activities  stand  for. 
There  are  other  theaters  in  which  the  same 
drama  is  being  played  out  under  much 
broader  and,  it  may  be,  more  complex  con- 
ditions, but  not  in  which  a  more  interesting 


168  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

or  indeed  dramatic  experiment  is  being 
made.  It  will  be  for  the  government  and 
the  people  of  the  American  Republic  to 
demonstrate  that  they  are  equal  to  a  task  in 
itself  so  delicate,  and  in  its  consequences 
so  grave  and  important. 


VI 

INDIA:  ITS  PEOPLE  AND  ITS 
RELIGIONS 


VI 

INDIA:   ITS    PEOPLE  AND  ITS 
EELIGIONS 

ONE  advantage  in  being  a  citizen  of  the 
United  States,  which  has  not  perhaps 
occurred  to  all  of  us,  is  that  the  American 
traveler  is  likely  to  see  the  great  East  in  its 
most  impressive  perspective.  Unlike  Euro- 
pean travelers,  he  does  not  ordinarily  ap- 
proach it  through  the  Suez  Canal,  but 
across  the  Pacific.  And  the  happy  result 
which  this  will  secure  to  him  will  be  this: 
that  he  sees,  first  Japan,  then  China,  and 
last  India.  An  artist  would  tell  him  that 
he  has  thus  secured  the  crescendo  of  color- 
Japan,  with  its  charm  of  prettiness  and  de- 
tail ;  China,  more  massive  but  more  somber ; 
and  then  India,  with  its  wealth  of  color  and 
outline,  which  culminate  at  last  in  Ceylon. 
A  very  considerable  part  of  this  impres- 
sion will  be  derived  from  Indian  architec- 
ture; and  in  all  respects  the  most  splendid 
effects  in  architecture  are  those  achieved  in 

171 


172  THE  EAST  OP  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEEOW 

the  temples,  with  their  mass  of  decoration, 
and  their  infinite  richness  of  detail  and 
color  wrought  out  in  gold  and  lacquer 
enamel. 

Inevitably,  the  mind  reaches  back  of  the 
structures  and  fabrics,  the  temples  and  the 
palaces,  to  the  people.  What  are  they  like ; 
what  do  they  believe ;  what  of  their  future  ? 
What  does  religion,  with  them,  stand  for, 
and  how  far  do  we  of  the  West  understand 
them  or  their  beliefs,  and  do  justice  to 
either?  These  are  questions  which,  espe- 
cially as  they  relate  to  Christian  missions, 
must  needs  interest  us.  Indeed,  what  more 
fascinating  vista  could  there  be  than  that 
which  opens  before  him  who,  to-day,  turns 
his  feet,  on  whatever  errand,  to  those  lands 
and  races  which,  of  late,  in  such  wonderful 
ways,  are  having  all  their  doors  flung  open 
to  the  world!  Whatever  else  was  true  of 
the  men  who,  as  missionaries,  first  set  on 
foot  that  mighty  invasion  of  the  heathen 
world  which  from  such  small  beginnings 
has  grown  to  such  noble  and  stately  propor- 
tions, this  certainly  was  not  true,  that  they 
had  then  advanced  to  such  a  recognition  of 
the  presence  of  God  even  in  heathendom  as 
led  them,  first  of  all,  to  seek  for  sympathetic 
contact  with  it.  We  cannot  read  the  story 
of  what  they  said  and  of  how  they  wrought 


INDIA:  ITS  PEOPLE  AND  ITS  RELIGIONS  173 

without  recognizing,  in  all  early  missionary 
enterprises,  in  modern  times,  a  very  im- 
perfect apprehension  of  the  fact  that  God 
has  not  left  himself  anywhere  without  wit- 
ness among  men,  and  that  their  little  sys- 
tems who  dwell  or  have  dwelt  in  pagan 
lands,  whether  of  philosophy  or  religion, 
while  but  broken  lights  that  were  destined 
to  have  only  their  brief  day-in  that  most 
like  so  many  of  our  own!— were,  after  all, 
yet  broken  lights  of  God;  dim  glimmers  of 
the  fuller  splendors  of  a  coming  day.  It 
is  in  this,  on  the  other  hand,  that  I  think 
our  noblest  progress  has  been  made.  The 
comparative  study  of  religions  has  brought 
to  light,  for  every  student  who  has  pursued 
it  with  thoroughness  and  candor,  at  least 
two  clear  convictions— one  that  God  has 
had,  in  all  human  history,  many  ways  of  re- 
vealing himself;  and  the  other  that  there 
is,  after  all,  no  wholly  right  method  of  mis- 
sionary endeavor  other  than  that  which  St. 
Paul  pursued  on  Mars  Hill  when,  as  he 
passed  by,  he  saw  an  altar  to  the  unknown 
God.  Not  ridicule,  nor  denunciation,  nor 
contempt,  was  his  method;  but  recognition 
— recognition  of  the  deep  want  of  man  and 
of  the  often  honest  though  often  blunder- 
ing methods  of  men  who  sought  to  find  an 
answer  to  it! 


174  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

Need  I  tell  those  to  whom  I  am  writ- 
ing that  this  must  needs  become  the  method, 
not  only  in  the  domain  of  religion,  but  in 
all  other  undertakings  in  connection  with 
which  we  of  Anglo-Saxon  lineage  are  turn- 
ing our  faces  toward  those  new  lands  and 
peoples  that  beckon  us  to-day?  It  must 
begin  in  the  domain  of  religion,  because  re- 
ligion lies  at  the  foundation  of  all  national 
life  and  personal  conduct,  and  it  must  begin 
there  by  being  just  and  speaking  the  truth. 

I  can  best  make  my  meaning  clear,  at  this 
point,  by  an  illustration;  and  in  choosing 
it  I  think  you  will  agree  with  me  that  I  am 
selecting  an  institution  which  lies  at  the 
basis  not  only  of  religion  but  of  all  social 
order.  It  was  my  privilege,  little  more  than 
a  year  ago,  to  spend  some  months  in  India, 
and,  while  there,  it  was  almost  instinctive 
to  seek  such  light  as  was  available  upon  the 
family  life  of  a  people  that,  whatever  we 
may  say  of  their  defects,  have  disclosed  in 
a  long  and  memorable  history  some  of  the 
most  noteworthy  traits  that  mark  a  great 
race  and  a  really  high  civilization.  For, 
the  family  life  is,  after  all,  the  key  to  all  the 
rest.  In  studying  the  history  of  another 
Eastern  people,  not  so  numerous  as  that  of 
India,  but  marked  from  their  earliest  ex- 
istence with  strong  and  fine  traits— I  mean 


INDIA:  ITS  PEOPLE  AND  ITS  RELIGIONS  175 

the  Hebrew-it  is  impossible  not  to  recog- 
nize how  powerfully  and  how  enduringly 
the  principles  which  determined  the  organi- 
zation of  the  family  and  the  laws  that  gov- 
erned it  have  influenced  and  determined 
the  whole  progress  of  its  growth  and 
achievement.  It  was  the  glory  of  our  Puri- 
tan ancestry  that,  in  an  age  that  had  largely 
lost  them,  it  set  about  restoring  some  of 
those  more  dominant  notes  of  the  Hebraic 
household  which  made  the  families  of  Israel 
such  mighty  forces  in  the  world;  and  no 
man  who  cares  to  understand  those  forces 
that  lie  among  the  foundations  will  be  in- 
different to  those  facts  which  reveal  the 
law  of  the  home  and,  e.g.,  the  place  of  wo- 
man in  it  anywhere. 

Well,  what  have  we  usually  been  told  on 
these  points  as  to  the  situation  among  these 
various  peoples  who  may  be  largely  de- 
scribed as  inhabiting  the  peninsula  of 
India?  It  must  be  owned,  I  think,  that 
whatever  the  sources  of  our  information, 
the  popular  impressions  of  Western  peoples 
have  ordinarily  been  that,  so  far  as  the  do- 
mestic life  of  India  is  concerned,  it  has  been 
one  of  uniform  cruelty,  lust,  and  degrada- 
tion. The  custom  of  child  marriage;  the 
hideous  usage  of  burning  widows,  known 
as  "suttee";  the  studied  maintenance  of 


176  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOREOW 

conditions  in  which  women  lived  in  rigid 
seclusion,  in  profound  ignorance,  and 
under  a  masculine  rule  at  once  without 
shame  and  without  pity;  these  are  tradi- 
tions in  which  I  presume  you  were  brought 
up,  as  I  was.  It  is  enough  to  say  of  them, 
one  and  all,  that  our  popular  impressions 
of  them  are  an  often  grotesque  distortion 
or  exaggeration  of  the  facts.  I  was  so  for- 
tunate, more  than  once,  as  to  make  the 
acquaintance  of  native  East  Indians  of  dis- 
tinguished rank  and  varied  culture.  More 
than  once  they  introduced  me  to  their  fami- 
lies and  presented  me  to  their  wives  and 
daughters.  In  all  such  cases  they  were,  I 
beg  to  say,  persons  who  retained  their  an- 
cient religion,  Buddhist,  Mohammedan,  or 
Parsee,  as  the  case  might  be,  and  who  had 
no  keener  enthusiasm  than  that  which  cher- 
ished their  national,  racial,  and  religious 
traditions.  They  answered  questions  about 
their  homes  and  children,  and  the  laws  that 
governed  them,  and  they  gave  me  chapter 
and  verse  in  their  sacred  writings  for  what 
they  told  me  in  regard  to  them.  Now,  then, 
let  us  look  at  some  of  these  testimonies  as 
indicating— not  what  may  have  been,  and 
doubtless  was,  a  degraded  practice,  here 
and  there— for  if  we  were  judged  by  these 
our  own  record  in  the  courts  of  the  civilized 


INDIA:  ITS  PEOPLE  AND  ITS  RELIGIONS  177 

world  would  not  be  an  unsullied  one-but 
the  law  or  rule  of  life  set  for  many  millions 
of  people  in  its  authoritative  documents. 
The  extracts  which  I  shall  quote  are  taken 
from  the  laws  of  Manu— Manu  being  the 
semi-divine  lawgiver  of  the  East,  whose 
works,  constituting  the  Veda  in  its  broader 
sense,  fall  into  three  general  divisions  of 
Sacred  Ceremonial  and  Domestic.  From 
these  last  I  take  those  laws  which  define 
the  place  of  woman  in  the  economy  of  East 
Indian  life: 


MANU. 

"Where  women  are  honored,  there  the  Devas 
(gods)  are  pleased;  where  they  are  dishonored, 
no  sacred  rite  yields  rewards.  Ill,  56. 

Where  female  relations  live  in  grief,  the 
family  soon  wholly  perishes;  but  that  family 
where  they  are  not  unhappy  ever  prospers. 
Ill,  57. 

In  like  manner,  care  must  be  taken  of  barren 
women,  of  those  who  have  no  sons,  of  those  whose 
family  is  extinct,  of  wives  and  widows  faithful 
to  their  lords,  and  of  women  afflicted  with  dis- 
eases. VIII,  29. 

In  order  to  protect  women  and  Brahmins,  he 
who  kills  in  the  cause  of  right,  commits  no  sin. 
VIII,  349. 

One's  daughter  is  the  highest  object  of  ten- 
12 


178  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOEEOW 

derness;  hence  if  one  is  offended  by  her,  he 
must  bear  it  without  resentment.  IV,  185. 

A  maternal  aunt,  the  wife  of  a  maternal  uncle, 
a  mother-in-law,  and  a  paternal  aunt,  must  be 
honored  like  the  wife  of  one's  spiritual  teacher; 
they  are  equal  to  the  wife  of  one's  spiritual 
teacher.  II,  131. 

(In  India  the  wife  of  a  spiritual  teacher  is 
regarded  as  a  living  goddess.) 

Toward  the  sister  of  one's  father  and  of  one's 
mother  and  toward  one's  elder  sister,  one  must 
behave  as  toward  one's  mother;  but  the  mother 
is  more  venerable  than  they.  II,  133. 

But  the  teacher  is  ten  times  more  venerable 
than  the  sub-teacher,  the  father  a  hundred  times 
more  than  the  teacher,  but  the  mother  a  thousand 
times  more  than  the  father.  II,  145. 

I  apprehend  that  if  that  last  rule  or  precept 
of  Mann's  were  propounded  in  some  Amer- 
ican homes  we  should  find  it  rather  strong 
meat  for  some  "heads  of  families"! 

But  it  is  said  that  there  are  customs  and 
usages  in  India,  such  as  child-marriage, 
which  are  monstrous  and  altogether  inde- 
fensible. Most  surely  they  are,  if  they  ex- 
ist as  they  are  popularly  represented  to 
exist.  But  suppose  that  we  obey  the  excel- 
lent maxim  which  enjoins,  "audi  alteram 
partem,"  and  hear  what  a  witness  of  their 
own  has  declared,  placing  himself  on  record 


INDIA:  ITS  PEOPLE  AND  ITS  RELIGIONS  179 

the  other  day  in  Carnegie  Hall  in  New 
York  in  these  words : l 

It  is  said  that  the  greatest  curse  is  the  child- 
marriage  in  India,  and  that  it  is  sanctioned  by 
religion ;  but  this  is  not  true.  Religion  distinctly 
forbids  it,  and  in  many  parts  of  India  so-called 
child-marriage  is  nothing  but  a  betrothal.  The 
betrothal  ceremony  takes  place  some  years  before 
the  real  marriage  ceremony ;  sufficient  cause  may 
prolong  the  period  of  betrothal  for  even  three 
or  four  years.  In  Northern  India  the  real  mar- 
riage does  not  take  place  until  the  parties  are 
of  proper  age;  it  is  attended  with  music,  feast- 
ing, and  the  presentation  of  gifts.  A  betrothed 
wife  stays  in  her  father's  house  until  the  time  of 
her  real  marriage.  In  Southern  India,  customs 
are  not  the  same;  many  abuses  have  crept  in, 
and  child-wives  are  often  given  to  their  hus- 
bands at  too  tender  an  age.  The  Hindoo  law 
does  not  prevent  the  remarriage  of  the  betrothed 
wife  after  the  death  of  her  betrothed  husband ; 
but  it  says  that  under  such  circumstances  the 
parents  of  the  betrothed  wife  commit  a  sin,  as 
of  giving  false  witness  before  the  court  of 
justice. 

In  this  connection,  the  following  remarks 
are  abridged  from  " The  Women  of  India," 
published  by  the  Madras  Christian  Litera- 
ture Society: 

i "  Woman's  Place  in  Hindoo  Religion,"  a  lecture 
by  Swami  Abhedananda. 


180  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

It  is  not  surprising  that  people  should  cling 
with  tenacity  to  customs  supposed  to  be  sanc- 
tioned by  ancient  religious  authority,  and  it  has 
been  said  that  in  India  every  custom,  whether 
unintelligible,  or  positively  indefensible,  be- 
comes a  religious  question.  Dewan  Bahadur  R. 
Ragunath  Row  has  probably  said  all  that  can  be 
said  on  this  subject,  in  the  two  editions  of  his 
pamphlet,  "The  Hindoo  Law  of  Marriage,"  pub- 
lished first  in  1882,  and  in  his  reply  to  a  review 
of  that  pamphlet  by  two  learned  Madhva  pun- 
dits, as  well  as  in  more  recent  papers;  and  his 
countrymen  must  read  and  judge  for  themselves. 

Happy  will  it  be  for  Hindoos  if  they  can 
conclusively  prove  that  their  religious  books  do 
not  require  them  to  break  the  laws  of  health  and 
reason  and  morality.  If  they  do  require  it,  so 
much  the  worse  for  the  laws,  and  all  one  can  say 
is  that  such  laws  cannot  be  inspired ;  at  any  rate, 
they  can  have  no  binding  inspiration  and  au- 
thority for  those  who  now  admit  these  evils. 
A  book  of  laws,  however  sacred  it  may  be  held, 
ceases  to  be  of  abiding  authority  if  those  laws 
are  out  of  harmony  with  intellectual,  social,  and 
moral  progress.  Is  it  not  irrational  to  suppose 
that  the  Laws  of  Manu— a  code  compiled,  accord- 
ing to  the  latest  computation,  1400  years  ago— 
with  its  minute  and  childish  formalities,  its  fan- 
ciful, unequal,  and  retaliatory  penalties,  such  as 
mark  the  'earliest  forms  of  criminal  legislation, 
its  uniform  leniency  shown  to  a  certain  class 
of  the  community,  and  its  entire  subordination  of 
women,  should  be  fitted  to  regulate  society  in 


INDIA:  ITS  PEOPLE  AND  ITS  RELIGIONS  181 

the  nineteenth  century?  Though  there  is  much 
that  is  majestic,  benevolent,  and  beautiful  about 
the  code,  are  there  many  among  those  who  have 
become  accustomed  to  more  humane  and  juster 
laws  who  would  like  to  live  under  it  in  the  pres- 
ent day  ? 

The  conservative  Hindoo,  however,  clings  to 
antiquity,  and,  in  the  matter  of  child-marriage, 
those  who  protest  against  it  have  antiquity  on 
their  side.  Kama  married  Sita;  Krishna  mar- 
ried Rukmini ;  Arjuna  married  Draupadi ;  Nala 
married  Damayanti,  not  as  children,  but  as 
grown  up  women.  And  as  for  the  Hindoo  re- 
ligious books  themselves,  a  careful  study  of  them 
seems  to  show  that  infant  marriages  "form  no 
part  of  a  religious  institution  in  India."  The 
very  mantras  that  the  Smritis  prescribe  to  be 
chanted  during  the  marriage  ceremonies  clearly 
indicate  that  the  bride  should  be  a  woman,  and 
not  an  infant. 

The  second  religious  basis  of  child-marriage 
is  the  doctrine  of  the  Shraddha,  or  the  ceremo- 
nies that  follow  the  funeral  rites.  Orthodox 
Hindoos  believe  that  if  they  do  not  leave  sons 
behind  them,  who  will  offer  food  for  their  souls 
after  death,  they  cannot  reach  heaven;  if  they 
can  secure  this,  they  may  rest  satisfied.  But  in- 
telligent men  do  not  believe  that  balls  of  rice 
and  flour  can  have  any  effect  on  departed  spirits ; 
that  any  ceremonies  or  sacred  places  can  acceler- 
ate the  progress  of  disembodied  relatives  to  hea- 
ven. 

According  to  the  Hindoo  law,  it  is  better  for 


182    THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

a  girl  of  a  high  caste  to  remain  unmarried  for 
life  than  to  marry  one  who  is  not  of  noble  birth, 
or  from  a  family  of  the  same  caste,  or  one  who  is 
unqualified  or  illiterate. 

Well,  I  am  not  clear  that  while  there  is 
no  law  among  us  of  the  nature  of  this  last 
precept,  we  have  not  a  similar  tradition 
which,  to  many  minds,  has  quite  the  force 
of  law! 

But  again;  at  this  point  I  hear  some  one 
ask :  ' '  This  is  all  very  well ;  but  what  have 
you  to  say  about  the  hideous  practice  of 
1  suttee,'  or  the  self-burning  of  widows?" 
Believe  me,  it  is  not  of  the  smallest  conse- 
quence what  I  have  to  say  on  such  a  subject, 
but  rather  what  they  who  are  accused  of 
such  a  custom  have  to  say.  And  here, 
again,  I  summon  the  accomplished  gentle- 
man and  scholar  who  has  already  testified, 
Swami  Abhedananda.  In  the  address  from 
which  I  have  just  quoted,  and  which  I  have 
yet  to  hear  challenged,  he  says : 

Self-burning  of  widows  was  not  sanctioned  by 
the  Hindoo  religion,  but  was  due  to  other  causes, 
the  fact  being  that  when  the  Mohammedans  con- 
quered India  they  treated  the  widows  of  the 
soldiers  so  brutally  that  the  women  preferred 
death,  and  voluntarily  sought  it.  It  is  often 
said  that  the  "Christian  government"  has  sup- 


INDIA:  ITS  PEOPLE  AND  ITS  RELIGIONS  183 

pressed  "suttee";  but  the  truth  is  that  the  in- 
itiative  in  this  direction  was  taken  by  that  noble 
Hindoo,  Rammohun  Roy,  who  was,  however, 
obliged  to  secure  the  aid  of  the  British  Govern- 
ment in  enforcing  his  ideas,  because  India  was 
a  subject  nation.  The  educated  classes  among 
the  Hindoos  had  strongly  protested  against  the 
priests  who  supported  this  custom  (which  pre- 
vailed only  in  certain  parts  of  India),  and  ef- 
forts had  been  made  to  suppress  the  evil  by 
force;  but  as  it  could  not  be  done  without  offi- 
cial help,  appeal  was  made  to  the  Viceroy, 
Lord  Bentinck,  and  a  law  against  "suttee"  was 
passed.  Thus  the  evil  was  practically  sup- 
pressed by  the  Hindoos  themselves,  aided  by  the 
British  Government. 

And  if  I  am  met  at  this  point  by  the  ob- 
jection that  this  is  the  mere  assertion  of  a 
partizan  Oriental,  whose  statements  must 
needs  be  taken  with  large  allowance,  let  me 
quote  one  of  the  most  eminent  English  au- 
thorities in  the  same  connection,  Sir  M. 
Monier  Williams.  Says  this  learned  Ori- 
entalist and  devout  Christian  scholar:  "It 
was  principally  his  (Raja  Rammohun 
Roy's)  vehement  denunciation  of  this  prac- 
tice, and  the  agitation  against  it  set  on  foot 
by  him,  which  ultimately  led  to  the  abolition 
of  'sati'  throughout  British  India  in 
1829. J>1 

1 "  Brahmanism  and  Hindooism,"  p.  482. 


184  THE  EAST  OP  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

I  need  not  pursue  these  illustrations  fur- 
ther. It  is  enough  to  say  that  every  one 
who  cares  to  do  so  in  a  painstaking  and  can- 
did spirit  will  be  continually  surprised  to 
find  how  wide-spread  in  Christian  lands,  and 
in  minds  that  we  are  wont  to  call  intelligent 
and  sufficiently  educated,  has  been  the  mis- 
apprehension which  has  prevailed  as  to 
customs  and  beliefs  among  peoples  of  alien 
race  and  faith. 

Do  we  ask,  now,  how  this  misapprehen- 
sion has  come  about?  I  answer  that  it  has 
had  a  threefold  cause:  in  ignorance;  in  a 
not  altogether  unamiable  passion  for  exag- 
geration; and  most  of  all,  I  am  persuaded, 
in  a  constitutional  incapacity  on  the  part  of 
the  Western  to  understand  the  processes  of 
the  Eastern  mind. 

Ignorance,  pure  and  simple,  has  been  a 
potent  factor  in  our  misapprehensions 
about  Oriental  foreigners.  Those  who  have 
lived  longest  among  them  will  tell  you  of 
that  secretive,  if  not  furtive,  habit  of  mind 
and  of  speech  which  so  widely  prevails  in 
the  East ;  by  which  we,  with  our  all  but  hope- 
less Western  literalism,  are  so  easily  mis- 
led, and  which  offers,  I  may  add,  so  strong 
a  temptation  to  one  with  an  often  merely 
playful  impulse  to  amuse  himself  at  the 
expense  of  another's  credulity.  There  is  a 


INDIA:  ITS  PEOPLE  AND  ITS  RELIGIONS  185 

legend  lingering  still,  I  think,  at  the  capital 
of  the  Republic,  that  a  British  traveler,  on 
asking  a  native  whose  was  the  ghastly  statue 
of  Washington  which  will  be  remembered  as 
sitting  very  inadequately  clad  in  the  neigh- 
borhood of  the  Patent  Office,  was  told  that  it 
was  a  statue  of  ' '  Sitting  Bull, ' '  and  that  the 
stranger  promptly  entered  the  fact  in  his 
note-book.  It  would  be  interesting  to  know 
how  much  of  our  knowledge,  e.g.,  of  China, 
for  the  last  two  hundred  years,  was  derived 
in  the  same  way,  and  of  the  same  accuracy. 
The  Abbe  Hue's  "Travels"  have  been  con- 
sidered a  mine  of  authentic  information; 
and  yet,  nothing  is  more  evident  to  one  who 
reads  them  than  the  extreme  difficulty 
which  this  accomplished  scholar  found, 
anywhere,  in  obtaining  trustworthy  infor- 
mation. Suspicion  and  distrust  of  the  for- 
eigner are  instincts  to  which  even  we  our- 
selves are  liable;  but  we  cannot  possibly 
measure  their  force  in  minds  whose  every 
tradition  has  trained  them  to  abhor  all 
foreigners,  and  who  have  seen  in  the  curi- 
osity of  the  alien  only  a  menace  or  a  sneer. 
And  then,  next  to  ignorance  in  the  West- 
ern observer  of  Eastern  peoples,  has  been 
the  inevitable  tendency  to  exaggeration. 
The  huge  inductions  from  small  groups  of 
facts;  the  hasty  generalizations  upon  the 


186   THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

basis  of  a  chance  incident;  the  desire  for 
dramatic  effect  in  literature  or  in  mission- 
ary addresses;  the  cheerful  willingness  to 
believe  the  worst  and  not  the  best  of  one 
whom  we  call  indeed  our  brother  or  our 
sister,  but  whom  by  no  possibility  we  could 
be  induced  to  treat  as  such ;  the  knowledge 
that  if  one  comes  back  from  a  foreign  land 
without  a  traveler's  tale,  painted  in  strong 
colors  and  of  tragic  proportions,  he  is  not 
quite  fulfilling  the  expectations  of  the  home 
public;  all  this,  together  with  the  further 
fact  that  books  and  discourses  about  for- 
eigners are  not  criticized,  as  they  should 
be,  by  foreigners,  has  made  it  easy  for  the 
modern  peripatetic  philosopher  to  create  a 
monster  in  literary  portraiture,  and  then 
persuade  us  to  accept  it  as  a  photograph! 
And  then,  finally,  there  has  been  a  great 
deal  that  has  been  brought  to  the  West  from 
the  East  which  is  the  product  of  that  abso- 
lute incapacity,  on  the  part  of  the  Western, 
to  understand  Eastern  mental  processes. 
The  East  thinks  pictorially;  the  West  liter- 
ally and  logically.  The  East  abhors  a  strict 
construction  of  language;  the  West  lusts 
after  it  with  a  strange  and  stupid  opacity 
as  to  all  the  traditions  of  the  language 
which  it  interprets.  The  East  continually 
employs  indirections,  without  a  thought  of 


INDIA:  ITS  PEOPLE  AND  ITS  RELIGIONS  187 

deliberate  untruthfulness.  The  West  for- 
ever construes  them  as  if  they  could  have 
no  other  motive  than  to  deceive.  Under 
such  circumstances  the  wonder  is,  not  that 
the  West  and  the  East  have  so  often  misun- 
derstood each  other,  but  rather  that  they 
have  understood  each  other  at  all.  "How 
far  is  it  to  the  next  town?"  you  ask  the  inn- 
keeper, from  whom  you  have  hired  your 
conveyance  in  China;  and  he  tells  you  that 
it  is  fifteen  miles.  You  hire  your  carriage 
at  so  much  a  mile,  and  then,  when,  having 
made  your  visit  to  the  neighboring  town, 
you  return  to  your  starting-point,  you  find 
that  the  innkeeper  has  charged  for  a  jour- 
ney of  fifteen  miles  going,  and  twenty-five 
miles  returning !  And  then  you  call  him  a 
liar,  a  thief,  and  a  swindler,  until  he  calls 
your  attention  to  the  fact  that  your  journey 
going  was  down  Mil  all  the  way,  and  took 
two  hours,  and,  returning,  up  hill  all  the 
way,  and  took  four,  and  that  he  is  justly 
entitled  to  be  paid  for  the  time  of  horses 
and  servants  and  the  extra  wear  and  tear  to 
both  of  a  heavy  grade  all  the  way  home.  In 
a  word,  all  the  equity  is  on  his  side,  and 
you  have  simply  misunderstood  him !  It  is 
a  homely  parable,  but  it  is  pertinent,  in  our 
dealings  with  Oriental  peoples  from  the  be- 
ginning to  the  end. 


188  THE  EAST  OF  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MORROW 

And  yet,  when  it  has  all  been  said,  the 
glorious  fact  still  remains  that  our  Western 
civilization,  literature,  and  most  of  all  re- 
ligion, have  something  to  give  to  the  peo- 
ples that  have  them  not,  of  incomparable 
value  and  potency.  One  cannot  but  feel 
sometimes  as  if  what  Dr.  Horace  Bushnell 
called  the  "out-populating  power"  of  the 
Christian  stock  were  one  of  its  divinest 
notes.  Said  a  distinguished  Chinese  pro- 
fessor in  the  Imperial  University  of  Pekin 
to  an  eminent  American  missionary:1 
"Why  should  we  not  send  missionaries  to 
your  country?"  The  missionary  replied: 
"By  all  means;  send  them,  and  make  the 
experiment."  "But  would  your  people 
receive  them?"  he  asked.  "Certainly," 
was  the  answer;  "and  their  message  would 
be  heard  and  weighed."  Do  you  suppose 
this  accomplished  Chinese  scholar  set  about 
such  a  work?  No.  He  was  proud  of  his 
race  and  his  religion ;  but  he  did  not  believe 
in  the  latter  ardently  enough  to  make  the 
smallest  effort  to  propagate  it.  He  was  a 
Confucianist,  and  believed  in  some  over- 
ruling power  which  he  called  "Strength" 
or  "Tien";  and  he  had  some  notion  of  a 
life  to  come,  as  evidenced  by  his  worship 

aDr.  W.  A.  P.  Martin,  President  of  the  Imperial  Tuner- 
wen  College,  Pekin.  See  "The  World's  Parliament  of 
Religions,"  Vol.  II,  p  1139. 


INDIA:  ITS  PEOPLE  AND  ITS  RELIGIONS  189 

of  his  ancestors :  but  between  him  and  that 
passion  for  souls,  on  fire  with  love  for  whom 
a  Divine  Redeemer  died,  such  as  sent  Mills 
and  his  heroic  companions  forth  to  die  for 
God,  there  was  a  great  gulf,  to  pagan  mind 
and  heart  immeasurable  and  impossible. 

And  so,  we  of  this  twentieth  century  and 
this  Christian  Republic  see  our  calling.  In 
all  those  new  and  largely  untrodden  realms 
whose  portals  are  opening  to  us  to-day, 
there  is  much  to  deplore,  but  much,  let  us 
not  forget  it,  to  respect.  Some  of  us  here 
can  recall  the  smile  of  mingled  mirth  and 
derision  with  which,  a  few  years  ago,  it  was 
announced  that  the  Mohammedans  were 
preparing  to  send  missionaries  and  estab- 
lish a  Mohammedan  mission  in  the  city  of 
New  York.  We  were  so  superior  in  our 
Occidental  virtue  that  the  whole  thing 
seemed  a  huge  joke.  And  yet,  thus  far, 
Christianity  has  utterly  failed  to  control 
the  vice  of  drunkenness.  The  great  cities 
of  this  land  are  dominated,  not  by  their 
churches  or  their  universities,  but  by  their 
saloons;  and  Christian  lands,  wherever 
they  are  to  be  found,  are  dotted,1  as  a  Chris- 
tian scholar  has  said,  "with  poorhouses, 
asylums,  jails,  penitentiaries,  reformato- 
ries, built  to  deal  with  evils,  nine-tenths  of 

i  Dr  E  R.  Sunderland,  "  The  World's  Parliament 
of  Religions,"  Vol.  I,  p.  630. 


190  THE  EAST  OP  TO-DAY  AND  TO-MOKROW 

which  are  said  to  be  caused  directly  or  in- 
directly by  the  drink  habit,  which  Christen- 
dom fails  to  control  and  is  powerless  to  up- 
root." But  Mohammedanism  in  Oriental 
lands  does  control  it.  Said  Isaac  Taylor, 
after  declaring  that  "Mohammedanism 
stands  in  fierce  opposition  to  gambling  and 
makes  a  gambler's  testimony  invalid  in 
law,"  "Islam  is  the  most  powerful  total 
abstinence  association  in  the  world." 

And  so,  I  repeat,  we  may  see  our  calling. 
Goethe  declared  long  ago  that  he  who  knows 
but  one  language  knows  none— I  commend 
the  maxim  to  those  zealous  gentlemen  who 
are  kicking  the  classics  out  of  our  colleges 
and  substituting  for  them  courses  of  botany 
and  civil  engineering— and  Max  Miiller  ap- 
plied the  same  maxim  to  religion.  Heirs  of 
a  great  faith,  it  belongs  to  us  to  learn  from  it 
so  much  at  least  of  the  law  of  the  brother- 
hood of  humanity  as  shall  enable  us  to  treat 
other  faiths,  other  philosophies,  other  man- 
ners than  our  own  with  courteous  consid- 
eration; and  then,  charged  with  great 
treasures,  beckoned  forward  by  great  ex- 
amples, humbled  and  instructed  by  past 
blunders  and  failures,  to  turn  to  the  new 
and  larger  tasks  that  are  before  us  with  a 
high  hope  and  a  great  patience  1 


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